Benjamin Piwowar

Region: South

City / State: Baltimore, MD

I'm drawn to the fertile, unstable territory that opens when an established system is disrupted or dissolved, and some other order is improvised in its place. These paintings began as an oblique dialogue with images collected from news sources over the past four years: photos of war, natural disaster, and political unrest. Beyond the obvious content of these scenes, my paintings reference the technologies used in their reproduction and circulation, with deliberately crude, handmade mimicries of digital glitches, pixelation, and filmic montage.

Where I end up is more playful and more ambiguous than where I begin. Parts of my images may evoke the source material, but these are inventions that result from a process of abstracting and repurposing the initial data. From one painting to the next, my goal is to create a coherent but pliable fictive space. Within this space, I take the forms that emerge from entropy, cataclysm, and poor planning as raw material, generating new relationships and implying new narratives.