bentrautman@gmail.com
| Come Visit: |
Friday, May 1 - Sunday, May 3, 2009 2009 MuseumExpo hosted by the American Association of Museums Booth No.1919 Pennsylvania Convention Center 1101 Arch Street, Philadelphia PA |
Statement:
My work combines the languages of industrial architecture and organic forms using intuitive engineering and experimentation. Inspired by cities, bones, mechanics and the movement of living organisms, I build sculptures suggesting creatures that inhabit the crevices of industrial decay. I work with dual languages, mass and delicacy or solidity and agility. Architecture inspires and hosts my work, provides context and scale, mass to inhabit or solidity to erode.
While the Futurists celebrated the revolution of technology and speed, I sift through the wreckage on the far side of that revolution. Instead of speed, I think of crawling, stretching and clutching. In failure, in the rusting hulks of fading industry, I find effort, fragility, and an elaborate inefficiency. I try to traverse the gulf between mechanisms and organisms with fluid forms, awkward motions, and twisting actions.
The problem solving of design inspires me. I use the lessons of engineering to minimize wasted material, but I avoid the language of efficiency associated with engineering, seeking instead to twist that language into expressive constructions, often choosing inefficient ways that require my labor. I am both artist and designer, solving a problem relating to structure or mechanics with simplicity or with excessive elaboration. I invest simple materials with work, care and effort. As mechanisms give way to electronics, we are losing transparency and physical scale to our built culture. My work brings technology back up to a human sculptural scale with a spirit to it that is more organic than technological.
The studio in Oakland, California is equipped to design, fabricate, deliver, and install a wide variety of work in steel and in wood, meeting the specific requirements of each project. Completed projects include mechanical sculptures for The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia and The Bay Area Discovery Museum in Sausalito. The next project will be another mechanical sculpture at The Anchorage Museum, to be installed in early 2010.