Dodo Notes
Gallery Shilla, Seoul
October 14 th – November 11 th , 2023

Working across sculpture, sound, drawing, and printmaking, Benson is known for interventions that combine, collapse, and cross-pollinate literature and found objects.

The works on display in Dodo Notes are investigations into the illuminating essays of nature and science writer David Quammen, and the contemporary resonances of texts by Enlightenment philosopher Holbach. While originating in vastly different historical contexts, these texts similarly attempt to make sense of humankind’s exile from the natural world. Benson dismantles and reconstructs these literary works by excising syllables of the musical scale––do, re, mi, fa, soh, la,
ti––to reveal found scores embedded within. In a further step, Benson translates the excavated scores into sound and geometric color field prints based on Isaac Newton’s similarly arbitrary Color Spectrum.

The Song of the Dodo and The Coming Thing are titles of essays in David Quammen’s stirring collected texts on extinction and evolution. Benson’s works, in eponymous homage, excavate Quammen’s texts, presenting hand-written reproductions of the pages with sections cut out to reveal what appears to be a code or new language. The artist applies her systematic intervention to create billowing greyscale prints that possess only a memory of color. In contrast to the earlier
series, these new prints are displayed independently from their textual referent as succinct abstractions that gently curve away from the wall to form sculptural reliefs. The scores and the abstractions invite the viewer to join in the act of translation, while slowing down the act of perception to create space and time for reflection. The nonsensical system is, to Benson, a reflection of the enduring failure of humankind’s relationship with the natural world.

In a groundbreaking gesture Benson uses partial phrases, cut away between the syllables of the musical scale, to create minimal sound sculptures. Made using only the speaker wire that carries the sound, the sculptures create new dimensional planes and shapes that redefine the exhibition space. The length of the found phrase dictates the length of the side of the plane, and the syllables found at the beginning and end of each phrase are used in the creation of the sound. These found syllables/notes are subsequently performed on the cello by musician and composer Alex Waterman. The form and sound of these new sound sculptures capture the melancholic hope proposed by the phrases Benson cut away from the text and composed into prose. For example:

grazing a frost-cove
all was enormous
off the trails, up and

and not many have
lead the shallow blue waters
among them 

Benson extends her profound gratitude to Alex Waterman with whom she collaborated on this work and performed on the cello in the recording of the scores.