Archival inkjet print on canvas and paper, plywood. 43.5 x 94 x 7 in.

 Benson has examined notions of exile and marginalization, sexism and patriarchy for many years. For this recent and ongoing body of work Benson employs textual reproductions and excavates a score by excising syllables of the musical scale—do, re mi, fa, so, la, ti—and thereby leaving gaps and creating absences in the text “to create a dialectical space.”^[1] Benson’s intervention and activation of the text “creates infinite possibilities for new compositions, leaving the reader to fill in the blanks, and setting a rhythm for reading and interpreting—and perhaps suggesting a revised history.”^[2] Benson quite literally makes space, allowing for a shift in thinking and, therefore, a shift in our own relationship to forms and ideas to make way for transformational possibilities.

Benson has used this practice in her most recent works, first begun at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic during the spring of 2020, working with excerpts from The System of Nature (1770) by (under the pseudonym Mirabaud), a haunting philosophical work that highlights humankind’s alienation from nature and that profoundly resonates in today’s world. Benson’s reading of the revolutionary text during a time in which the fragilities of nature were paramount has prompted her own personal search for a new landscape and relationship with nature. Through her found, text-derived score based on relevant passages, Benson then creates an interdisciplinary dialogue that manifests itself in a sound-based component and color field prints.

In her sculptural color field prints which hover in an illusory space between two- and three-dimensions, Benson then uses an algorithm to translate the found score into an abstraction based on Isaac Newton’s color spectrum. In Benson’s own system, which later involves a complex, hands-on, multi-step printing process, each syllable is assigned a color and layers of dots in various hues are then created, their opacity dictated by their frequency in the score. The printed, shifting layers create an undulating moiré effect resembling reflections on water that evoke an ever-evolving visual embodiment of our collective plight; the work’s luminosity expresses a contemporary reawakening of the continued crisis addressed in Mirabaud’s groundbreaking texts. The color prints further the notion of displacement and dislocation derived from Benson’s own removal and repurposing of the original text from which the work draws its inspiration and livelihood.

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^[1] Benson in Alipour, “JANE BENSON with Yasi Alipour.”

² Barbara MacAdam, “Vasari Diary: On John Gibson (1933–2019), Rob Wynne, Jane Benson, Robert Murray, and Film Forum,” ARTnews, March 15, 2019, https://www.artnews.com/artnews/news/vasari-diary-on-john-gibson-1933-2019-rob-wynne-jane-benson-robert-murray-and-film-forum-12147/.