‘Somewhere That’s Green’ by Benjamin Cabral curated by Lauren Powell
SPRING/BREAK Art Show 2020, New York | March 3 - 9
Benjamin Cabral is a multidisciplinary artist whose bead and rhinestone encrusted paintings and sculptures straddle the line between craft and fine art. His work is largely autobiographical and performative in nature, creating an honest, yet inherently unreliable, portrait of the artist examining the intersections between trauma and nostalgia, joy and sorrow, and the digital and the analog. Cabral’s paintings are conceived digitally, and the pixels are then transferred to the panel through the meditative application of beads.
At the Los Angeles SpringBreak Art Show 2020 Cabral installed a site-specific room-size installation titled “Real.Amazing”, the slogan that the popular though controversial SeaWorld uses today. This installation presented an amusement park pastoral evoking an artificial Arcadia both joyous and melancholic.
For the New York SpringBreak Art Show Cabral expands his exploration into the realm of the domestic with "Somewhere That's Green", a title borrowed from the 1982 cult Broadway musical Little Shop of Horrors. In the song the character Audrey dreams that her path to happiness and escape from "Skid Row" is obtainable through the commodities of the mid-century middle class: "a washer and a dryer and an ironing machine.../ In the Pine-Sol scented air / somewhere that's green." In his installation Cabral examines these signifiers here creating a suburban front yard complete with a picket fence, a garden, and fluffy clouds in the blue skies overhead. His paintings, suggestive of window glimpses, present the viewer with vaguely menacing scenes as well as those of domestic bliss - a peaceful garden and a serene figure in prayerful contemplation. The richly ornamented surfaces employ the vernacular of both belabored craft and seductive commodity, examining memory, autobiography, and nostalgia.
For more information, please email: lauren@artofthis.world
