Jennifer Gilman’s intricate, architectural sawdust drawings and Christian Benefiel’s bold, explosive mixed-media sculptures adorned Area 405’s restored brewery showroom last Saturday night. The joint showing, titled InDirect Art, highlighted a pair of artists whose work at first glance couldn’t appear more different, but upon further reflection revealed many connections.
Benefiel is currently based in western Maryland but grew up in and around the Baltimore area. Originally a metal-caster by training, Benefiel moved into large, space-claiming sculptures such as his pieces on display at Area 405. His work could be described as snapshots of explosions: he described his pieces as “in a perpetual state of collapse.” When constructing pieces like his largest installation at Area 405, a spiky array of pine boards jutting out from a ladder that just barely contains them, Benefiel will create concept drawings of his work, then move over to conceptualizing in a digital modeling program “and then use that to pull measurements, so that the tension lines up and [the piece] doesn’t collapse.”
Much of Benefiel’s work is full of tension, in several ways. The pieces themselves are actually in a constant state of delicate balanced, constantly on the verge of sliding to the floor in a heap but held together by Benefiel’s craftsmanship and careful calculation. “The way that they’re put together is that this element is suspended, and then the whole piece is kind of dropped and caught in a moment, which happens with a pretty high rate of success. Sometimes they collapse totally. It’s about building that tension up and then capturing it in an instant… They’re stable, but there’s this real dynamic feeling to it.”
Benefiel’s work is also concerned with a more figurative kind of tension, a push and pull between different internal and external aspects of the self. One of the pieces that best exemplifies this tension is his sculpture in which a dusty red bicycle is captured within an explosion of boards, while a well-used chair is held suspended out on one long, slim board. Benefiel said, “I’ve always really been in into the concept of passive and aggressive, the way that the passive overtakes the active. A lot of the conceptual drivers in this work are coming from examining a relationship. You have a relationship with yourself. For me, one of these relationships is your mind versus your body.” The concept of the bike, as active and surrounded by a containing network of boards, contrasted with the chair, passively and easily held on just one, exemplifies the desire to maintain the body but the ease of letting passivity take hold. Yet the tension in the sculpture suggests the continual tension of these competing desires, and the way that they could change at any moment.
While Benefiel was originally invested in very calculated, mathematical forms, he is now more interested in the way his work takes shape organically, a cue he takes from nature: “what I observed [in my earlier work] is that because there’s such a set number of rules the shapes wind up being relatively predictable. I’m really interested in the way that organic, natural forms also tend to follow this set of predetermined rules. But if you ever look at the way a tree grows around an object like a fence or into a power line or something like that it’s still following that same set of guidelines but it’s able to adapt and modify. With these works I was trying to…[follow] more of an organic form to really break out the shape of the piece.”
Gilman, based in Los Angeles but originally from Virginia, works in a variety of mediums but is currently working on a series entitled Liminal Drift, of which her piece at Area 405 was Number Five. Nontraditional materials like sawdust intrigue Gilman because “it’s unexpected as an artist’s material. And because of the color of it, there’s a sense of not quite knowing what it is. Or maybe your initial impression isn’t right or something. So it starts to evoke other things, because of that tension between knowing and not knowing.”
Gilman’s work uses red sawdust which she then sweeps with a janitor’s push broom and a common straw household broom to shape the art how she wants it. While she will often do concept drawings before she begins to work, the ultimate product of her efforts may wind up being very different from her original concept because of the materials with which she works: “That can be frustrating at times and it is hair-raising at times, but it makes it much more interesting to me. If I could completely control it, I think I would get bored. There are things that I do that are very precise, but I always end up introducing some element that is something I can’t control.”
For Gilman the lack of control leads to something of a personal philosophy, which she hopes comes through in the work itself: “It just makes you really pay attention to the moment you’re in. If you don’t pay attention to what’s actually happening at that very moment…you miss what is actually happening. And for me it is both a way of being in the world that I like, and hopefully some of that gets translated to other people… It makes you wake up, it makes you pay attention to right this moment, and that is really inspiring to me.”
The shapes the art takes are very site-specific, in part because of Gilman’s training as an architect: “This drawing actually refers to the structure of the [Area 405] building, and it has the references to some of the materials of the building. Partly in the color, partly in the patterning, the lines here that demarcate where the heavy beams are in the building… This would be totally different if it was in a different space.” The space also contributes to the process of making the work itself, in Gilman’s sense of immersion within the drawing: “It’s a drawing that is the size of the room. I’m in the drawing as I’m making the drawing, so the drawing inhabits the space instead of the drawing being of the space.”
Benefiel’s pieces are larger-than-life, explosive affairs, forcing the viewer’s eye to them as soon as one walks in the room; Gilman’s are intricate, delicate whorls and eddies on the floor. What connects these two seemingly disparate artists? Stewart Watson, Area 405’s executive director, sees a variety of similarities: “because they’re both using these materials that are more like the things that commonly make up other things, or it’s sort of the building materials themselves, or the things that clean up after the work has happened…and the fact that they’re both talking about process, they’re both talking about these drawing in space, drawing with materials in a very temporal nature, that it just kind of fell together super naturally.”
Both artists have an intense relationship with space, Benefiel’s work taking up space vertically and laterally and Gilman’s sweeping across nearly the entirety of a floor. For Watson, the challenge was displaying the pieces in ways that best worked with the space. The lighting in the gallery was especially key: Gilman’s piece was roped off to preserve the integrity of its floor space, but the lights beaming down on it delineated its dimensions even further. The way the light played across the spiky pine wood of Benefiel’s pieces created a dynamic mix of light and shadow, accentuating their reach even further. The artists’ work was displayed in different rooms, and as Gilman put it, “It’s kind of like having ice in one room and boiling water in the other.” And yet as different as the two are from one another, they are both ultimately the same substance.
