Guy Benfield, Night Store

Guy Benfield’s Night Store will be an eight-week long performative installation in Art in General’s Storefront Project Space. Drawing on tropes of modernism, faux ceramics, sculpture, painting, collage, and references to alternative collectives, Benfield transforms the architecture of space from tidy white-box gallery to pottery showroom, to artist studio, and eventually overcrowded storage space. Through various situational episodes in this non-stop evolution, Benfield explores the relation between current artistic practice and supposedly defunct strains in performance including ritual, transcendency, and live-action painting. Imagining the “trauma of pottery” as an expressionist dialogue, Benfield considers the space of the storefront as a kiln in which failure and unpredictable success commingle while pretense is burned away.

Presented by Art in General for Performa 09.

Guy Benfield from Art in General on Vimeo.

Guy Benfield was born in Sydney, Australia and is a Brooklyn-based artist. He has exhibited internationally with recent solo exhibitions in Sydney, Melbourne, Lisbon, New York and Brooklyn. Benfield’s work has been included in group exhibitions at Le CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, France; BRIX Gallerie, Berlin; Artspace Sydney, Australia; the Monkey Town Semiennial, New York; the Shanghai Biennale, China; Atelierfrankfurt, Germany; Zacheta National Gallery, Poland; the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius, Lithuania; and Escola Maumaus, Lisbon. Benfield has received grants from the Australia Council for the Arts, Maumaus School for the Arts (Lisbon, Portugal), and Arts Victoria. His work has also been featured in publications such as Frieze, Flash Art, NYARTS Magazine, Art Review and Art World.

Presented by Art in General for Performa 09.

Performa 09 (November 1-22, 2009) is the third edition of the internationally acclaimed biennial of new visual art performance presented by Performa, a non-profit multidisciplinary arts organization dedicated to exploring the critical role of live performance in the history of twentieth century art and to encouraging new directions in performance for the twenty-first century. www.performa-arts.org

The New Commissions Program is made possible by a grant from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Additional support is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts; Jerome Foundation; and the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation.

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