Barnes Collection, Philadelphia © Ben Marcin
Ben Marcin photographs everyday structures such as walls, parking garages, office buildings, stairwells, sidewalks, and warehouses. Ben says he "is not interested in documenting these structures but in extracting certain elements from them to create photographs that describe shapes and forms, patterns, geometry and color." Most successfully!
In this project, he traversed several museums, photographing everything but the art. "Marcin set out to create a work of art by using the basic infrastructure of a building that houses masterworks of arts. He spent hours inside each museum photographing the ceiling lights, hand rails, display cabinets, air conditioning ducts, auditorium seats - anything he could think of other than the actual art hanging on the walls. Occasionally this led to interesting conversations with the security guards. Later he built very complex grids using selected individual photographs, thus presenting a virtual deconstruction of each museum. All of the photographs in the composites are straight images."
Go see: Ben's solo exhibition at C. Grimaldis Gallery in Baltimore, now through December, 23, 2017 (in conjunction with another aCurator favorite, Tara Sellios).