ARTIST’S STATEMENT Jennifer Benn
My work is a uniting of Art with Machine. Chaos & Order, Science & Art.
An exploration of computers and other modern technologies deciphered via Art: through color, design, mark-making, symbol, sign and as icon. I am immersed in decoding technology- both intellectually and emotionally - and its affects on the world. Aesthetically the machines of past, present and invented future fascinate me, and in their designs and my re-interpretations of them, I combine my symbolic perception and desire/confusion of them into new hybrids of machine & art.
Beyond the loaded or overloaded information in the subject of my work, it is often color interaction and coding with the technological content that stimulates and fuels my painting; I work to search, uncover and resolve new content and understanding in their combination. Often the combination breaks down to Chaos and Order. I believe that without Chaos, breakthrough visions and needed change would not be possible and simultaneously without Order, those new ideas could never be brought to fruition. In my work I allow myself to be dazzled and confused by the world of technology. And by remembering always the human hand and mind that created these marvels, I come to know them better through my examination and reInterpretation.
The visual aesthetic & attraction of technology comes from places like the chaotic and supremely ordered control centers of NASA, the beauty, power and conflicting tragedy of rockets/shuttles and rocket launches, the profusion of key inputs on various data pads, the nostalgic and simultaneously futuristic space ships of Star Trek and the science-fiction world of imagination and the science fact world of today’s reality.
It is the particular look of the sci-fi world, as well as ideas of the power of the machine, and technological advancement that intoxicate me. The simplicity that is the nature of the workings of the machine is sharply conflicted to the chaotic confusion created by computers. It is this chaotic confusion of simple things: ones and zeros, of mysterious three letter acronyms and buzz-words; of lights blinking, of rows and rows of numbered connection points created by a machine that flashes on and off, on and off- that I try to convey in my work. The chaos being the out-product created by trying to impose a rigid scientific ordering on the world.
“Art is truth revealed via sensory form” = Hegel Jennifer Benn
