Brian Benfer

“Uninterrupted time to make work, the space to make it in, the communal vibe and the freedom to just sit and think” are four aspects of the VSC experience for which sculptor Brian Benfer, VSC’s Clowes Fellow, is grateful. He’s been enriched by his conversations with VSC’s international community of artists and writers and is inspired by the legacy of artists who’ve used VSC’s studios to immerse themselves in making art.

“Though my work has physically taken many different formats in terms of its final presentation—from prints and paintings, to installations and video, to revisiting again the object itself—regardless of materiality, residue is always the essence of the work.” A minimalist, Benfer explores the extent to which his “physical involvement is necessary to `create’ the work” and locates himself in the tradition of New York School installation artist Robert Irwin and musicians John Cage and Tom Waits. When he began working in clay, Benfer was immediately fascinated by how “archaic and new processes act as a catalyst for rebellion against the object and of craft. Fire is the one variable that holds ceramics together and it is the fire, not the object, that is my primary interest.”

Given Benfer’s increasing focus on the connotations of residue as the ghost of what’s left behind, his VSC studio, suggestive of a rich history of past occupancy, has been an apt muse. To capture this history Brian painted his studio wall with blackboard paint and covered it with white chalk to reveal the marks and imperfections left by previous artists. In so doing he created a surface that reflects the past through the marks of the present. Unlike his past work, his VSC-site-specific sculpture is both anti-object and impermanent.

A native of Indiana, Benfer received his MFA in Visual Arts at Rutgers University in 2003 and his B.A. in Studio Art from Humboldt State University in 2000. His work has been shown internationally and will be featured in the 2009 NCECA Clay National Biennial Exhibition in Phoenix.

Since his last VSC residency in 2003, Brian has shifted in his role from student to professor. Benfer’s VSC residencies have allowed him to follow the advice he has given students: “to push themselves out of their comfort zones, to break out and do something new.”