8 March 2018 Sadie Benning Sleep Rock

19 April – 24 June 2018 Preview: Wednesday 18 April, 6.30 – 8.30pm First major exhibition of the American artist in the UK, with entirely new work

Sadie Benning, Sleep Rock, 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects. Photo: Chris Austin

This spring, Camden Arts Centre is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of American artist Sadie Benning in the United Kingdom.

The title of Benning’s exhibition, Sleep Rock, evokes a dream state where perception is blurred by the merging of memory, vision and association. Benning's work makes categorisation and fixity seem impossible, relying instead on slippages and splices to illustrate how even familiar images are subject to constantly fluctuating interpretations based on context, scale and resolution.

For this exhibition, Benning has created over 20 new wall-based works that occupy a hybrid space between painting, photography and sculptural relief. Installed sequentially in Camden Arts Centre’s Galleries 1 and 2, the works read with a filmic register, frame by frame. Through the varying sizes of the panels and images used by Benning, there is an important operation of scale brought into play. Fragments are enlarged or brought closer, photographs dissolve into painterly abstraction, and images remain mutable, reflecting an indexical relationship to the multiplicity of meanings projected onto them.

Scale also affects Benning’s use of materials in this body of work. Large-scale works are built through a process of fragmentation and reconstruction. The works originate as small drawings, which are then projected, resized and traced onto wooden panels. The panels are cut into pieces following the lines of the drawing. Benning applies layers of aqua-resin onto each piece and sands them until smooth before painting and then reassembling the components. The surface of the

finished work has an ambiguous materiality, sometimes resembling ceramic or leather. For the small-scale works in this exhibition, Benning has developed a new approach that involves slowly layering resin and composite transparencies, with painted and photographic cut-out elements.

As individual panels and as an installation, the work in Sleep Rock creates open and evolving narratives by presenting associative relationships between seemingly disparate elements. Benning’s work speculates on an aesthetic sphere uninhibited by fixed categories. Images are always read next to, through or over one another, locked within composite forms that refuse medium-specificity. This in-between quality of Benning’s current work reflects decades of enquiry into the operation and influence of cultural material, beginning with Benning’s earliest video works made in the late 1980s and subsequent explorations in drawing, painting and music production. The process of amassing, recontextualising, editing, sequencing, and destabilising both found and original content continues to propel Benning’s practice.

For press information and images please contact:

Lia Kent Mackillop Communications and PR Manager [email protected] +44 (0)20 7472 5511

Notes to Editors:

Sadie Benning (b. 1973 Milwaukee, , USA) lives and works in New York, USA. Benning has had solo exhibitions at Renaissance Society, Chicago, IL, USA (2016); Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland (2017); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA (2009), The Power Plant, Toronto, Canada (2008), Dia Foundation for the Arts, New York, USA (2007); and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, USA (2005). Benning’s work has been included in group shows including Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon at New Museum, New York, USA (2017); Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age, Museum Brandhorst, Munich, Germany; and MuMOK, Vienna, Austria (both 2016); Macho Man, Tell It to My Heart: Collected by Julie Ault, Kunstmuseum Basel, and Artists Space New York, USA (2013). Benning has participated in The Carnegie International, , PA, USA (2013); Annual Report: 7th Gwangju Biennale, (2008); the Whitney Biennial, New York, USA (2000 and 1993) White Columns Annual, New York, USA (2007); and the Venice Biennale, Italy (1993). Public collections include: ICA Boston, USA; BFI, London, UK; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, USA; MCA, Chicago, USA; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. USA; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA; MOMA, New York, USA; and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, USA.

Camden Arts Centre is a place for contemporary visual art and education, where ideas are made visible and people of all ages and abilities can engage in the creative process of making. Camden Arts Centre’s pioneering and varied exhibition, residency and education programmes have gained an international reputation as a model of good practice. It is a forward-thinking organisation where artists and others can see, make and talk about art.

Coinciding with Sadie Benning: Sleep Rock, Camden Arts Centre also presents Ian White: Any frame is a thrown voice, an exhibition and public programme reflecting on the work of Ian White, curated by Kirsty Bell and Mike Sperlinger, 19 April – 24 June 2018.

Opening Times: Tuesday – Sunday: 10.00am – 6.00pm camdenartscentre.org Wednesdays late: 10.00am – 9.00pm Twitter: @CamdenArtsCtr Closed Mondays Facebook: Camden Arts Centre T: +44 (0) 20 7472 5500 Instagram: @camdenartscentre