No Way Back
Benjamin Ferguson

Benjamin Ferguson created the Eye Witness Gallery to exhibit his expressionist art which explores the subconscious and questions our place in this world. The abstract logic of intuition guides the subject matter and palette, reflecting the natural and subconscious worlds. Quick marks become figures, objects, and landscapes, which flicker and move through the layering of color and images, and dry brush stokes cross washes with linear elements. Animals, plants, buildings, and objects are sometimes anthropomorphized to explore the playful, dangerous, and unpredictable elements of human nature. Produced through subconscious activity, the inhabitants move across the canvas, coming to life through layers of color. Angular relationships create movement and urgency to mirror the disorder of the world around us.

As his visual work involves movement, Benjamin sees music as a logical extension. He performed live electronic music – all hardware and no software – sprinkled with voice samples supporting immigrant rights, prisoner rights, Palestinian rights, radical labor union concerns, and anti-war and anti-capitalism view points. Realizing the world and the life which inhabits it is turbulent and often complicated, he maintained an element of Dada to emphasize the absurd and illogical, the radical left, and the desire to destroy traditional values. Performing under the name The Missioncreep, Benjamin Ferguson played rhythmic downtempo industrial versions of his expressionist art. In the Eye Witness Gallery, the spectator witnesses the secret life of the subconscious world combined with the struggles we see in the news happening all over our desperate planet.

About the Artist

Since I was old enough to hold a crayon, I was creating art impulsively, intuitionally, and constantly. Growing up in the South, teachers would complain about or compliment my art as it usually appeared on my homework, and friends and family members were often baffled that I preferred drawing to playing sports. After receiving my BFA in Drawing and Painting from the University of Georgia, I fled the South as far as I could – to Seattle – and exhibited in numerous venues for ten years.

A combination of influences began to affect my work: exposure to German Expressionism and post war art movements, contemporary art, and a vibrant anarchist community which focused on labor, immigrant, and prisoner rights. The emotional response to these influences were perfectly accommodated by my intuitional and subconscious approach to creating art. Soon experimental video and their soundtracks, which had begun while living in the South, became a logical extension of my drawing and painting. I currently reside in Brooklyn and am drowning in art.

For more information on Benjamin visit his website and follow him on Instagram.



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