Ben Deroy

2007 - Sculpture (Sculpture)

Ben Shaffer

year born: 1924
gender: female
nationality: Canadian
home town: Louiseville, Canada

Ben Shaffer’s Ben Deroy (2007) is part performance, part self-portrait, and part spiritual vision. Often the artist works with the motifs of the counterculture and contemporary non-religious spiritualism. The figure hangs suspended—seemingly ascending—animation. The figure looks like some kind of countercultural superman empowered by myriad alternative experiences, as worthy of myth as the heralded Laocoön.


Ben Shaffer’s works are dynamic installations that integrate sculpture, painting, and performance. His complex pieces often require direct interaction from viewers, eschewing simple subject-object relationships in favor of relational negotiations. Through his makeshift neo- psychedelia, Shaffer explores the legacy of counter-cultural imagery, specifically its fragile utopic horizons and ever-receding promises of enlightenment and transcendence. Shaffer lives and works in Los Angeles, and received his MFA from Claremont University in Southern California.


Colors:



Related works featuring themes of: » Abstract, » Abstract Landscape, » Automatism, » Bright/Vivid, » Canadian

Arbol y Pelicao (Tree and Pelican)
© » KADIST

Federico Herrero

2009

Federico Herrero’s energetic paintings reflect his experiences on the streets of his native San José, Costa Rica, and in the surrounding tropical landscape...

Untitled (Pasta Painting)
© » KADIST

Scott Reeder

2013

Reeder’s works often start with language—and his Pasta Paintings are no different...

Ponderosa Pine IV
© » KADIST

Rodney Graham

1991

Ponderosa Pine IV belongs to a series of large-scale photographs of trees taken by Graham and depicts a particular species that live in Northern California...

Mao, who curves himself along the edge of the paper
© » KADIST

Liu Yin

2010

Liu Yin’s cartoon-like paintings and drawings explore the ambivalences of love, nature, and consumerism...

Study for my Heroes in the Street (Stan)
© » KADIST

Ian Wallace

1986

Wallace says of his Heroes in the Street series, “The street is the site, metaphorically as well as in actuality, of all the forces of society and economics imploded upon the individual, who, moving within the dense forest of symbols of the modern city, can achieve the status of the heroic.” The hero in Study for my Heroes in the Street (Stan) is the photoconceptual artist Stan Douglas, who is depicted here (and also included in the Kadist Collection) as an archetypal figure restlessly drifting the streets of the modern world...

Publica
© » KADIST

Liu Yin

2010

Liu Yin’s cartoon-like paintings and drawings explore the ambivalences of love, nature, and consumerism...

Be Oblivion, in Disconnect
© » KADIST

Natasha Wheat

2011

Wheat’s work is built on a strong conceptual framework that weaves together commentary on social and political issues and the radical potential for change...

Back to mother
© » KADIST

Zai Kuning

2014

Concerned with the early history of Singapore, Zai Kuning spent many years living with and researching the history of the Riau peoples who were the first inhabitants of Singapore...

Hand Palm Echo 1
© » KADIST

Christine Sun Kim

2022

Hand Palm Echo 1 is a digital animation based on Christine Sun Kim’s staircase mural at The Drawing Center in New York (10 March – 22 May, 2022)...

Telescopic Pole (Tennis Balls Red) and (Tennis Balls)
© » KADIST

Chadwick Rantanen

2010

Telescopic Pole is an adjustable telescopic pole that extends vertically from floor to ceiling and is held up by its own internal pressure...

Kerosene Triptych
© » KADIST

Natasha Wheat

2011

Natasha Wheat’s Kerosene Triptych (2011) is composed of three images, one each from the digital files of the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Field Museum tropical research archive...

Untitled (Breathless)
© » KADIST

Ian Wallace

2000

Untitled (Breathless) presents a folded newspaper article on Jean-Luc Godard’s À Bout de Souffle (Breathless)...

Apartment on Cardboard
© » KADIST

Chris Johanson

2000

Apartment on Cardboard (2000) is an exterior view of an abstracted apartment building...

Mike and Sky
© » KADIST

Catherine Opie

1993

Like many of Opie’s works, Mike and Sky presents female masculinity to defy a binary understanding of gender...

Snow White as a balance beam gymnast
© » KADIST

Liu Yin

2010

Liu Yin’s cartoon-like paintings and drawings explore the ambivalences of love, nature, and consumerism...

Study from May Day March, Los Angeles 2010 (Immigration Reform Now) and We Are Immigrants Not Terrorists
© » KADIST

Andrea Bowers

2010

The small drawings that comprise Study from May Day March, Los Angeles 2010 (Immigration Reform Now) and We Are Immigrants Not Terrorists are based on photographs taken at a political rally in downtown Los Angeles in which thousands of individuals demonstrated for immigrants’ rights...

Ballerina
© » KADIST

Liu Yin

2010

Liu Yin brings the tension of a small but imminent catastrophe into the gallery with a raw egg balanced on the edge of a folding table....

LAB
© » KADIST

Kori Newkirk

2013

LAB (2013) conjures the body as the trace of a sooty hand appears, spectrally, on a crumpled paper towel...