BEN GARTHUS

My work is born of limitations: the limits of the expected, the limits of the ordinary, the limits of a graphic designer’s vocabulary and work-a-day constraints; the limits of cyan, of magenta, of yellow, the limits of “key” -- the black determiner of the final image. The work -- born of these constraints -- simultaneously pushes against these limitations to discover moments of humor, eccentricity, and beauty. 

This current body of work draws specifically from my experience working as a graphic designer, a job bound as much by production concerns and techniques as client demands. Working within the expected standards of CMYK print production, I’ve looked for seams and errors, mistakes and missteps, to create a language that sounds like graphic design, but sounds like an off-rhyme, sounds slant. Creates a world designed by an echo. 

As a sculptor at heart, this work lays the foundations for thinking through and conceptualizing larger scale work. Though these prints are literally four-color prints, they act more like blueprints -- the mind’s first thought toward changing the material conditions in which it finds itself thinking: marble, dice, wood, string, stone.