Will Schneider-White + Benjamin Bellas | Ostensible Fictions

Artists Will Schneider-White and Benjamin Bellas distort the boundaries between the lived and imagined in Ostensible Fictions, an exhibition at Hamiltonian Gallery. Ostensible Fictions will run from September 14 – October 19, 2013 with an opening reception on Saturday, September 14 from 7-9 pm.

Will Schneider-White’s paintings present an aqueous environment in which languid figures read and are read, reflect and are reflected. Simultaneously placid and unsettling, humorous and dark, Schneider-White’s work revels in its recursive and contradictory imagery, inviting viewers to question his narrative structures. 

Benjamin Bellas memorializes moments both imagined and real through his haunting found-object sculptures. Created with everyday objects, some of which include family heirlooms, the meaning of Bellas’s work shifts with the inclusion of his accompanying prose, allowing his objects to serve meditations on the poetics of memory and contemporary life.

Will Schneider-White | Artist Statement
Paintings are inevitably reflections of the painter. Some of these paintings are images of myself, and some of them are images of the imaging of myself. Water becomes an equivalent to painting in its ability to hold and reflect, and distort. The idea of a reflection losing its referent is the natural process of a painting. 

These paintings follow the untied reflection, still made of its reflective stuff. They let the synchronicity of the reflective act fade, allowing the idea of reflection to lose its assumed faithfulness.  A book, a painting, and an ultramarine pool become sites of indifference towards their original reference; the reflection begins to work independently. Water lends its blue, definitions shift. 

Benjamin Bellas | Artist Statement
I seek to understand the experience of understanding.

I want to see how information changes vision.

Instead of writing sonnets or post-punk anthems, I interact with the quotidian and offer the unassuming artifact or action as an epiphany.

It’s cerebral sculpture, or lyric visual art.

Through this battle I’d like to destroy everything in my path... disrupt existing systems, and leave them irreparably damaged in my wake... scorch the earth and salt the ground. Some days I want to be Shiva, others Dennis Quaid.

(My titles don’t fit in the spaces allotted, and neither do my descriptions of materials and processes.)

I seek to disrupt the formulaic within the comfortably established norms of artistic display and practice.  The expected is to be unexpected.

Simple is paired with complex, emotion with pure logic, synthesis with analysis, and each pairing against each other simultaneously.

It is not work aimed at the eyes, but at the process behind them... at cognition itself.

I am firm in this regard: information is the greatest dictator of aesthetic.

 

click here to download a copy of the press release

September 14 – October 19, 2013

Opening Reception: 
Saturday, September 14
7-9 pm

Hamiltonian Artists:
Will Schneider-White

Guest Artist:
Benjamin Bellas