About this event

The title of Ben Skinner’s latest solo exhibition, “Don’t Get Any Ideas”, is the first indication of what we’re in for. The work is not only a cacophony of ideas – brilliantly observed, a visual and tactile delight – but also a meditation on our complex world made more so by all the extras we pile onto it: nostalgia, memory, gamesmanship. The result is a trip so playful and serious, so poignant and yet so coolly ironic, a world where expectations are subverted at every turn, that you might later wonder if you dreamed it. Did I really see a wall-sized photograph of plaster replicas of plastic packaging looking exactly like an abandoned alien city? Was that a six-foot pencil?   

Much here has been precisely fabricated, and all that sleek precision is the perfect vehicle for Skinner’s cool approach to his subject matter. There are at least six ways to experience every Ben Skinner art object, which gives you an idea – not that you should get any – of the pleasures of his work. There’s no one answer, there’s no answer at all, often. Skinner isn’t a binary thinker, he isn’t interested in telling you what to think, only that you do. It’s a wild ride through “not only, but also”, voiced by an unreliable narrator, leading us into territory which feels and looks familiar but is somehow not. From his website’s statement, “I love the blurry and the banal. I believe in the phonetics of materials and the grammar of space. I’m interested in the invisible systems of the everyday.” 

This art invites engagement. We are encouraged to play with stickers of crayons that are literally “One Thousand Shades of Grey” and draw on a pad of paper as tall as we are. “Canceled Cultures”, in which stamps are pinned entomological specimens as if in a Victorian curio cabinet, invites close inspection. Every stamp is from a region colonized by England throughout history, and realizing this is a quietly devastating moment. The title alone is one of those mental chew toys Skinner is always tossing at us: stamps are canceled, cancel culture is a very current issue, not to mention the invalidation of those cultures reframed through a foreign power – namely, you, as glimpsed in the mirrored Mylar. Typical of Skinner’s approach, we’re drawn in by pleasing symmetry of a well-made object, and then the ramifications kick in. 

Comically outsized objects, the mundane turned incomprehensible, the hidden joke. Skinner often treats the intangible like something he can dissect, and not always like someone intent on getting to the point of it all. His work obscures the obvious, scrambles the straightforward. Skinner’s decade-long search for every conceivable material cut or cast into perfect 2-inch cubes is an ever-changing, always-growing collection of the nearly 300+ on display here. In a sense, looking at cubed quartz, lead, cork, sulfur, wax, etc. and a smatter of perishables such as chocolate and cheese, one is struck by many thoughts – some worrying about the mind that conceived this, others asking the question, is this taxonomic inventory an attempt to create order from chaos, or is it simply absurdly satisfying to see and touch perfect cubes of, say, memory-foam or Bakelite? 

“All We Had To Do”, text-based reliefs in laser-cut steel, powder-coated in a glorious yellow, and “Spell It Out”, photographs of someone attempting – and possibly failing – at communication using Banangrams tiles, are two text-based series in which an object and its significance play off against one another. The text’s meaning – rueful hindsight in one, tentative anguish in the other – is equaled by the extraordinarily materiality of the work, the silky surfaces and intense colour, the latter with custom-made Corian frames matching the look and feel of actual game tiles. Meaning and experience merge but the result is not clarity but rather its opposite. Skinner is implying nothing is as it reads, that we are right to ignore the warning issued by his show’s title. Be curious, he seems to be saying, take chances. Just try. The truth is in the looking.