| Buzz Spector (2009) |
| Exhibition Catalog Essay: “Ben Dallas,” Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland OR, 2000 |
| |
| http://www.bendallas.com/ |
| |
 |
| |
| Ben Dallas, Gradient, 1999, acrylic on wood, 17.5 x 3 x 1.5/.125 |
| |
| |
| I am trying to check my habits of seeing, to counter them . . . . |
| I am trying to be unfamiliar with what I’m doing. |
| |
John Cage, Silence |
|
| |
| Ben Dallas makes art works through an accumulation of subtle conflicts and nuanced oppositions. They are plays, counterings, of the measured with the indeterminate, the analytic with the accidental, refinement with decay, elegance with abjection, cold facts with ambiguity, and the object with the pictorial. In his work, these oppositions exist in an uneasy tension, never canceling each other, never settling the conflict. And out of these incongruities comes a taut, paradoxical beauty. |
| |
| Even in his materials, there is a contradiction at work. At first glance, the painted surfaces deny the underlying wood; the surface is as smooth as polished metal or molded plastic. But moving closer, in the kind of intimate inspection these works demand, they are clearly made of wood, joints exposed, edges sanded. As evident in his Fold (1999), they are all very planar in their configurations—one piece of wood carefully glued to another, a solid set of planes. But this is another site of contradiction, these multiple surfaces each become a pictorial surface. The delicate modulations of paint make us read space where a moment before we saw an object. Each facet of the object becomes an atmosphere. |
| |
| They are surfaces, then, with a history: scraped, scratched, eroded, patched. Traces of hand-written text, fragments of images from newspapers and magazines, the peculiar orange-peel texture of paper laid over viscous paint and then peeled off, grainy expanses of delicately clotted and scumbled pigment. It takes time for the strata to form, and this process constructs a story. The compression of materials, the replacement of one surface with another, the changes of color, all happen sequentially, marking time. New things are made as others disappear. |
| |
| The paint is applied and removed, puddled, wiped, brushed, sanded, printed, rubbed, in an alternating process of addition and subtraction, of creation and destruction. The surfaces are made in layers, but in the end they become one surface, a residue of stains and pattern, smudges and crisp lines pressured together into something whole and integrated, the way ocean sediments are compressed into marble. In this processing all gestures become indirect. Brushmarks are scrubbed into a trace of their former record of the hand. In fact, Dallas goes farther to achieve this indirectness, using rubber stamps and various screens to imperfectly imprint and pattern the surface. On the front plane of Gradient (1999), a dot pattern printed over a bluish-gray ground decays into larger dots, creating a complex figure-ground reversal. |
| |
| The effects often allude to other media or even subject matter. In some works like Off (1999), a set of five small wedges, the combination of the degraded line pattern and the dimly glowing orange stain suggests a fragment of video screen. And in others such as Four Views (1998), the interrupted, uneven use of a rubber stamp on four horizontal rectangles suggests the dot screen of a degraded newspaper photograph. More often, in a work like Show (1998), we catch a hint of landscape. |
| |
| But we are never sure about any of these allusions. And we are uncertain about any specific image they may contain. They flit through our brains as fleeting possibilities, like the longing for images we experienced in the snow of pre-cable TV. They are just beyond our recognition. The creation of these uncertainties is an important part of what these art works do, and that means this is an important part of their content. We doubt and keep looking. There is no stable information available. We never become completely familiar with them. |
| |
| But this uncertainty and doubt runs smack up against the physical factualness of these works as objects. They are things that aggressively occupy space. They assert themselves on a wall, demanding space, the more the better. They make us aware of a tension on the wall’s surface. They take up any slack on the wall and lie suspended, the way a needle can float on the surface of a glass of water. They protrude from the wall, but even here a contradiction appears: the overall darkness of edges and surfaces sometimes seem to pierce the wall in an illusion of space, a hole. The long tapered wedges of the Gradient series play with this ambiguity most overtly. They are objects suspended in a moment between emerging and submerging, but from the front, they can appear as a narrow slot into another space. This ambiguity is partly caused by the way shadows form when a tilted plane rests on a vertical wall. |
| |
| Another way Dallas’ works occupy the wall is as serial objects. He scatters and stacks repeated units across the surface. A single work like his Combination Red (1997) includes many pieces, exact in their physical form, but inexact in their painted surfaces. Each piece seems to challenge the others. Unlike the modular works of minimalism, such as the serial works of Donald Judd, these objects do not pull inward to a state of self-referential solipsism, we are too busy noticing the slight differences between the surfaces, too aware of their inexact replication. And the change from one piece to the next suggests time, even narrative. |
| |
| Dallas’ art works demand slow contemplation. The conflicts and oppositions that are in and around these objects are not melodrama. They ask for careful attention. The delicate tensions that are wound tight in the process of layering and erasure or the geometry of construction and the accidents of paint reveal themselves slowly. The uncertainty created by these oppositions does not result in the blatant anxiety that such conflicts more commonly produce. These tensions flex and press in a more nuanced way—uncertainty and doubt that shape a longing for knowledge. |
| |
| |
| © 2000 Timothy van Laar |
|