Forty Portals
Shelf Doubt
Line Drawings
Special Vessels
Forty Portals
Shelf Doubt
Line Drawings
Special Vessels
A shelf is a place to display things, but what about shelves themselves? Don't they have feelings too? What is it like to display something while accidentally being on display yourself?
These wall sculptures are made from the same squishy polyurethane foam used for household items like kitchen sponges, couch cushions, insoles and Nerf footballs. A soft, playful material, poured as a one piece, blurring the line between the show-er and the shown thing.
A continuous series of around forty cast concrete shrines that borrow freely from found and imagined architecture.
A gang of cartoon idols that are almost performances of sculptures. Proud but pathetic, sacred but silly, reverent and irreverent. For more, watch this mock interview.
Having never studied pottery, this project began as an experiment in craft thinking.
Many design questions are completely foreign to the artist: How much does it weigh? Who is your user? What purpose is it intended for? Without clear answers, these ceramics developed their own fictional world. Ceremonial objects for visitors from another world. Pottery for aliens.
Or maybe they are the aliens. Sculptures trespassing as pottery, studying their behavior, imitating their vernacular. Do they pass? Find out on this podcast.
Every line is a record of its making, its own autobiography. A drawn line can be read the way a psychologist reads handwriting, for clues about personality. Who drew that line? What was their mental state? Can we even know? This work is based on the ridiculous idea that we can. That a line is a legible record, a reflection of the consciousness that made it, a transmission from within.
The word signature contains the words sign and nature. When you sign with a line, you are performing your identity, a mark to prove you were there. These drawings take the line as their primary unit: sine waves, pulses, signatures, irrational horizons and floating cacti.
An album documenting work in progress, failed experiments, and notes to self.
Open album ↗
Ben Wadler is an American artist working in concrete, clay, and cast sponge. He studied at Bard College, Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, and the Royal College of Art in London, where he was the recipient of the Kenneth Armitage Sculpture Prize. He has worked in museum education at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and as a visiting artist at Bard, the RCA, and the Neue Donau Universität St. Pölten. He lives and works in Vienna.
When writing about his work in the third person, the artist Ben Wadler says he uses sculptural tropes as surrogates for consciousness, selfhood, sexuality, and identity. The forms perform recognizable roles as their boundaries dissolve: a vase emerges or dissolves, a wall becomes a door, a shelf with nothing to show winds up on display itself.
Because that's what it feels like to be a person.
The self doesn't have clean edges either, or holds its shape the way it's supposed to. It's defined, bound to a role, and then suddenly uncertain of its own edges.
Each of his pieces is built or poured in one go, using disposable improvised molds: a way of problem-solving with the hands and bypassing the mind, which he thinks is better for art. Despite all his big ideas, he believes that the artist is only part of the equation, and that meaning is made collectively, by all of us together.
Email copied / @b_wad