Erik Benjamins

19 March 2024

  1. After-Dinner Walk
  2. Alex Reed’s Home Work
  3. Ben Sanders is Drawing at the Dinner Table
  4. Bookends & Good Hugging
  5. Bookshelves & Hard Optimism
  6. Bottega Louie
  7. Built In at the Neutra VDL House
  8. Building Block
  9. Butts of Florence
  10. Confessions of an Anonymous Recipe
  11. Crying Into the Breadbox
  12. Disintegrating Smeller
  13. Eric Payne
  14. Forgetting the Words
  15. Free Smells
  16. Happiness for Art21 Magazine
  17. Running of the Interns
  18. Schindler Centennial for Cereal Magazine
  19. Self-squaring and Double Acting
  20. Sitting Suite for Seed
  21. To Sit is to Time Travel
  22. The Spongiologist’s Mantra
  23. Use All Five
  24. Wood Fire Chicken for Lucky Peach
  25. Young Joon Kwak’s ‘The Cave’
  26. Show All

Forgetting the Words 2018

A list poem, three ways (2018-2020).

A cascading column of words about contact, touch, and proximity respond to a photographic series of images made with a flatbed scanner-as-camera. First exhibited as a floor-to-ceiling, concrete poetry-inspired vinyl installation, this poem simultaneously described the mechanical processes with which the accompanying photographs were made while generally alluding to a language of the body and its pressures. In the following months, I worked with the printshop at the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity to produce a letterpress adaptation, in which the words were printed in a blind deboss (sans ink), taking form through the pressure of metal type onto paper. Recently, Foreland Catskill invited me to create a public work on the occasion of Upstate Art Weekend. We opted to render the poem in my handwriting, scaled to the building’s exterior as a two and a half story banner.

Forgetting the Words
River Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
Summer, 2018

Limited Edition of 15, 2018
Letterpress on Stonehenge White 250gsm archival paper
8.5 x 17 in.
Printed at the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity,
Banff, Alberta, CA

Upstate Art Weekend
25 x 15 ft. vinyl banner
Foreland, Catskill, NY
Summer, 2020