Ben Deroy
2007 - Sculpture (Sculpture)
Ben Shaffer
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:
Other related works, blended automatically
© » KADIST
Federico Herrero
2009Federico Herrero’s energetic paintings reflect his experiences on the streets of his native San José, Costa Rica, and in the surrounding tropical landscape...
© » KADIST
Scott Reeder
2013Reeder’s works often start with language—and his Pasta Paintings are no different...
© » KADIST
Catherine Opie
1993Like many of Opie’s works, Mike and Sky presents female masculinity to defy a binary understanding of gender...
© » KADIST
Natasha Wheat
2011Wheat’s work is built on a strong conceptual framework that weaves together commentary on social and political issues and the radical potential for change...
© » KADIST
Kori Newkirk
2013LAB (2013) conjures the body as the trace of a sooty hand appears, spectrally, on a crumpled paper towel...
© » KADIST
Natasha Wheat
2011Natasha 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...
© » KADIST
Rodney Graham
1996Tree on the Former Site of Camera Obscura (1996) belongs to a series of large-scale photographs of trees taken by Graham and depicts a particular species that lives in Northern California...
© » KADIST
Chris Johanson
2000Apartment on Cardboard (2000) is an exterior view of an abstracted apartment building...
© » KADIST
Bernardo Ortiz
2011Casa de la cabeza (2011) is a drawing of the words of the title, which translate literally into English as “house of the head.” Ortiz uses this humorous phrase to engage the idea of living in your head....
© » KADIST
Andrea Bowers
2015Bowers’ Radical Hospitality (2015) is a sculptural contradiction: its red and blue neon letters proclaim the words of the title, signaling openness and generosity, while the barbed wires that encircle the words give another message entirely...
© » KADIST
Ian Wallace
2000Untitled (Breathless) presents a folded newspaper article on Jean-Luc Godard’s À Bout de Souffle (Breathless)...
© » KADIST
Ian Wallace
1986Wallace 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...
