EVENSONG 23:
BOOK OF REMEDIES
BEN GARDNER
11/1/24-12/21/24
Ben Gardner - Forgotten Clarity, 15” x 11”, mixed-media on paper, 2024
The Weather Station is pleased to present Evensong 23: Book of Remedies, an exhibition of new and recent work by Ben Gardner. Evensong 23: Book of Remedies brings together new work on paper from this prolific artist, whose drawings, collages, artist books and assemblages synthesize imagery and visual systems and from a wide range of esoterica.
There is a restlessness running throughout Ben Gardner's practice, whose work has taken many forms over the years. Although formally trained as a painter, over the last two decades Gardner's practice has explored poetry and fiction, animation and moving image, sound, music, and sculpture. Running alongside each of these iterations is a consistent and prolific drawing practice, which in many ways acts as a battery to the artist's creative output as a whole. In Gardner's recent drawings, the artist employs text, layering, and collage to create jagged, garrulous compositions that appear quickly composed - almost at the speed of thought. Alongside symbols, sigils, and pools of watercolor, the artist incorporates handwriting into many of his pieces, giving the sense of a dashed-off note or quickly scrawled idea jotted down while otherwise distracted.
Ben Gardner - The Unended, mixed-media on paper, 15” x 11”, 2024
A naturally horizontal thinker, Gardner draws his imagery from a wide range of sources to create his work. Illuminated manuscripts, outsider art, Appalachian spiritual traditions and the aesthetics of Spiritualism are just a few of the touchstones he has returned to time and again throughout his career. With Evensong 23: Book of Remedies, he once again revisits these visual reservoirs. UNENDED reads the top of Gardner's drawing of a same name, hand-lettered above a collage of lists and found index cards; THE MISSING AND UNKNOWN reads the lower portion. While these phrases both extend and complicate the symbols that appear alongside them, they might also serve as a description of the types of imagery Gardner has employed throughout his work - he is continuously drawn to alternative and outsider visual histories - bodies of work, thought, and life that all too often fall to the margins.
One of these histories is the culture of Appalachia, which Gardner was exposed to early on. "My Dad grew up in Appalachia," he explains, "and as a family we would travel to the panhandle of Virginia every year." Although the artist himself was raised in a northern Illinois farming community, Gardner recalls growing up with storytelling and folklore as a part of his everyday life. The practical use of plants, a prevalence for handcraft, and woodcarving as an art form were all around him. "I've gravitated towards that culture and that type of work for my entire life," Ben says, and in his work we detect a comfort with multiple ways of knowing the world. Flora, magic, and language all coexist alongside each other on the page, sometimes on top of last week's grocery list. Gardner's ongoing use of found papers and collaged notations can also be traced to the artist's early history - his parents were part of a bowling league, and the pads of paper brought home from the bowling alley quickly became sketchbooks for the young artist.
Ben Gardner - Ghost Hope, mixed-media on paper, 15” x 11”, 2024
However, Gardner's work is more than a synthesis of its many elements, and in Evensong the artist's ambitions are greater than the sum of their parts. Discrete elements that seem rarefied among Gardner's drawings soon give way to recurring motifs, or patterns - they reveal an inter-connectedness within the artist's diverse imagery and among the belief systems he freely draws from. What's more, we begin to recognize our own thinking inside these patterns, and in the language Gardner peppers through each piece. HAVEN'T BEEN ABLE TO SEE ALL OF THE POSSIBLE / THINGS YOU ARE FEELING reads the base of Ghost Hope, an echo of the artist's ongoing search for an outer form to describe an interior world.
Gardner's collage-and-layered techniques perfectly suit this bricolage approach to subject matter - by casting his net wide and positioning traditional folk remedies alongside 80s horror-film tropes, something deeper begins to emerge. "The symbols of the divine initially show up at the trash stratum," wrote Phillip K. Dick, describing the unexpected spaces one might seek out greater wisdom - an idea that has become vital to the artist over the years. And indeed, another of the artist's interests lies in Jungian archetypes: universal themes, motifs or patterns of thought that belong to the unconsciousness of all human beings, and which provoke emotional responses, or a sense of identification. In the world of these archetypes, Gardner himself plays the role of the Magician: the bearer of knowledge both ancient and new, who seeks to transcend through cognition, learning, and understanding.
In this light, it's no surprise that for Gardner the book is a form of tremendous potential. Many of the works in Evensong look and feel like pages excised from an unseen volume, but for this exhibition the artist will present a manuscript-in-progress in a large installation on the rear wall of The Weather Station. Titled Lost Pages, this work brings together fragments from a larger piece the artist is currently developing - a kind of personal, sacred urtext that, in the Magician's words "will bring together many strands."
Ben Gardner - Tomb of Forget, mixed-media on paper, 15” x 11”, 2024
Benjamin Gardner is an artist and writer living in the Midwestern United States. Gardner’s short animation hallucination dream sequence (2017) was an official selection for Iowa PBS’s Film Lounge Season 2, Cosmocinema Film Festival in London, The Shared Sight Film Festival in Romania, and the Experimental Film exhibition at the CICA Museum in South Korea. It won Best Animation in 2020 at the Beyond the Curve International Film Festival and Best Experimental Film at the 4th Dimensional Film Festival in Bali. In addition to moving image, Gardner makes music as ASURTA and Lost Music Library, releasing albums through Neverwoord Records and Nim - Brut. He is the co-owner and editor at Theurgical Studies Press, a publishing company that makes limited edition risograph zines of a horror, weird, and speculative nature. He is also publishing graphic and multimedia stories and novels as Adorcist Books. His publications include stories in Night Terrors Vol. 4, The Knot Wound Round Your Finger published by Bell Press Books, and Mysterium Tremendum: Axis Mundi. He was a guest blogger for the PBS series Civilizations.
Ben Gardner - Lost Pages, mixed-media on paper, dimensions variable, 2024