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March 6 - June 6, 2015 Main Gallery

Hours Tuesday - Thursday & Saturday: 10am-6pm

Friday: 12pm-8pm

Ben Butler’s sculptures and drawings are contemplations on our relationship to the natural world. Drawing from diverse influences- musical composition, Chinese scholars’ rocks, and emergence theory- he generates forms that evoke, simultaneously, human design and natural growth. Butler’s new installation, Elegy to the Disappearance of Objects, is an exploration of these themes on a colossal scale. A grand and enigmatic form hovers above the viewer, suspended by an intricate and seemingly fragile wooden framework. Each segment is segmented and richly textured, rhythmic yet amorphous. A strong sense of time and process pervades the artwork, as the structures seem to be at once both emerging and dissolving.

Artist Statement

Elegy to the Disappearance of Objects Ben Butler

Artist Ben Butler working in the Main Gallery, Turchin Center

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Ben Butler received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and his BA from Bowdoin College. His work has been exhibited in solo shows in New York at Coleman Burke Gallery and Plane Space, as well as at Zg Gallery in Chicago, John Davis Gallery in Husdon, New York, and Davidson Galleries in Seattle, among others. He is the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Individual Artist Grant and numerous fellowships at residency programs including the MacDowell Colony, The Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, and the Ucross Foundation. He currently lives and works in Memphis, Tennessee and Quogue, New York. He is an Assistant Professor of Art at Rhodes College.

About the Artist

A special thank you to Wilson Keel, Industrial Design student at Appalachian State University, for the laser cut wood letters in the exhibition title.

Cloud Morphology I, 2014