Vanderbilt’s Department of Art is pleased to welcome an exhibition by Benjamin Fox-McCord into Space 204
Vanderbilt’s Department of Art is pleased to welcome an exhibition by Benjamin Fox-McCord into Space 204. Meanders will be on display from September 22 to October 26 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. A closing reception with the artist will be held on Wednesday, October 26, from 4 to 6 pm.
Space 204 is sponsored by the Department of Art and is located on the second floor of the E. Bronson Ingram Studio Arts Center, 25th and Garland, on the Vanderbilt campus. All exhibitions are free and open to the public.
Fox-McCord’s work is produced in a variety of ways, but drawing has always been at the core of his practice. The act of drawing, the visual reproduction and abstraction of real-life forms onto a two-dimensional plane, is a distinctly human endeavor and is one of the few ways that describes our interaction with and perception of the world around us, with any measure of honesty. Fox-McCord uses a combination of drawing, printmaking, and occasionally, sculptural elements that reference drawing, in an attempt to present the viewer with a window into my experience of the fusion of beauty, grotesqueness, order, and chaos that is life as a sentient being in a world that is, for the most part, far outside the realm of my control. The printed image has a formal and conceptual relationship to contemporary life, in that printed material saturates the modern world in the form of books, magazines, and advertisement. For this reason, he focused on producing prints and books for many years before beginning to create installations. Fox- McCord is certain that he will always produce traditional, edition prints and books. Fox-McCord continues to explore the possibilities of combining the printed multiple with drawing and sculpture in installation, because the form has the power to function as a more immersive experience which relates more closely to his conceptual aims.
Fox-McCord’s work often deals with the feelings of mass anxiety, claustrophobia, and simultaneous boredom that seem to be inescapable in the contemporary world. In much the same way that early scientists, who created measurements from their own proportions, and prophets, who attempted to personify the incomprehensible, used their own bodies to explain the world around them. Fox-McCord most recent body of work focuses on creating his own scenarios for both creation and potential apocalyptic events. That said, he is equally fond of making work about Sasquatches, beards, bikes, birds, and countless other frivolous things.