BEN JEANS HOUGHTON
On The Ark And I 2009, Durational Installation, A DUCK FOR MR DARWIN, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead.
Coping With Theandor 2012, A piece of fiction commissioned by Corridor8 Magazine.
Tsu 2011, Still from 16mm Film & Found 35mm Slides – 9 minutes
ARTIST STATEMENT
A Note From The Author
Blinks slow like hands clapped, time is collapsed and these moments are visible. For me Art is a means of discovery, a way to dive into the gloaming deep, the dense strata of existing human knowledge and experience, returning with a thing to be seen in a new light. My practice is polymathic, explored and delivered in various media including sculpture, installation, film, photography, drawing, performance and writing. I see my work as a research practice discovering and disseminating information through new visual synergies; employing entrenched or paradigmatic systems of understanding and taking them beyond themselves in order to uncover other possibilities and alternate ways of understanding the world and human experience. My practice is located within an extensive and ongoing discourse on the role and potential of art as a fluid and empirical system to explore, discover and unveil poetic or ‘Ecstatic Truths’ (Werner Herzog) i.e. truths which may be suffused with subjectivity, mystery and uncertainty.
At the heart of my practice is an investigation of the objects and ideas from the phenomenal world which surrounds us and the narratives or conceptual frameworks by which we attempt to decode, rationalise and understand them. My work manifests in various forms according to the inherent properties of the ideas pursued; taxonomy through collections; On The Ark And I, the nature of perceived reality through film; Yugen, historicism and narrative through text and images; Black Cloud. Throughout my investigation of all these ideologies and modes of communication there is a consistent endeavour to rupture the finite boundaries of those concepts; an inquisitive undoing of explicable reality in order to creatively reveal something outside of both language and explanation, to articulate what can fall between the lines and to give platform to the ineffable things that maintain our interest in being alive. My work is not an interest illustrated but a means to afford others different ways of seeing beneath, beyond or within received and axiomatic understanding of reality. I work to puncture the habitual momentum of perception and to reveal the wonder, oddity and lineage of the structures we rely on; our senses, our cognition, our knowledge.
Core to my practice is the use of art as a means for underlining, stretching or compressing the viewer’s experience of time in order to invite contemplation and an awareness of the present moment and themselves within it. This serves to affirm the reciprocal relationship between artwork and audience and the individual viewer’s relationship to the work as active agents in the construction and translation of meaning. My aims are equivocal to those of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Chris Marker and Werner Herzog; seeking perpetually to abate apathy, to reveal elements inherent in each chosen subject that may at once confound and shed light on something fundamental and to offer a reflexive experience of understanding.