Monte Vista Projects is pleased to present The New Retail Mycology, an exhibition of new photographs by Benjamin Lord. The project explores notions of the made and the found, and how personal experiences are constructed and demolished in an age saturated by advertising.
The photographs depict elaborate but ephemeral sculptural tableaux, conjoining the intentionality of highly wrought craft objects made by the artist with a range of scavenged materials whose provenance is more obscure. Reversing the customary assumption of a photographer’s studio as a place of rigid authorial control, Lord’s illusionary assemblages depict tenuous arrangements that walk a line between earnest handicraft and absurdist satire. Mushrooms and fungi appear throughout the project as both physical materials and as a deliriously mixed metaphor for spontaneous organic generation, the corporate branding of psychedelic experience, and the limits of scientific knowledge. Combining influences from advertising imagery, Japanese flower arranging, and the freeform juxtapositions of the internet, these images extend Lord’s longstanding interest in the illusionistic space of “sculptures” that exist only in the photographic imagination. Presented in candy-colored painted aluminum frames, Lord’s miniature worlds chart a space of freedom where the deliberate and the accidental mingle imperceptibly.
The opening reception will be on Feb 7th from 6 – 9 p.m. The exhibition will run until 3/01/2015. Gallery hours are 12 -5 p.m. Sat and Sun or by appointment.
Checkout review by Alicia Eler "When Consumer Goods Blossom Into Otherworldly Fungi"