HOUSTON, TX.- Rice University Art Gallery has commissioned a new installation by Memphis-based artist Ben Butler. Butler’s sculptural process mirrors the natural world’s systems of order and construction in which simple, predictable patterns repeat and accumulate to form unexpectedly complex structures. In his Rice Gallery installation, Unbounded, he uses thin, hand-cut sticks of poplar wood to create an intricate lattice that is simultaneously rigid and rhythmic, dense and airy.
Butler explores through sculpture the similarities and differences between human and non-human structures. He is interested in the concept of emergence in which individual parts do together what they could not do alone, for example, as in the formation of flocks of birds or ant colonies. In Unbounded, Butler will use a quintessentially human device – the grid – but will mimic nature’s generative building process to form an expansive architectural superstructure in response to the gallery space. Through a dense layering and accumulation of irregularly sized grids, Butler’s installation seemingly “grows” as a rigid system that becomes, paradoxically, an amorphous and not easily definable form. Butler notes, “I am interested in creating an installation that envelops the viewer, that is immersive and difficult to truly perceive in its entirety, something undeniably physical yet strangely ethereal. There is a beautiful contradiction that presents itself when through repetition the very simple becomes complex or even overwhelming.”
Ben Butler received an MFA in sculpture from the School of Art Institute of Chicago and a BA in visual arts with high honors from Bowdoin College. Butler has also studied at the School of Visual Arts, New York and has completed residencies at ACRE (Artists’ Cooperative Residency and Exhibitions) (2014), the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art (2008), The MacDowell Colony (2004), and the Ucross Foundation (2000), among others. In 2006, he was awarded a PollockKrasner Foundation grant. He has had solo exhibitions at Suyama Space, Seattle, Washington and throughout the United States. An upcoming exhibition of his sculptures and drawings at The University of Mississippi Museum, Oxford will open in September 2015. Butler lives and works in Memphis, TN and Quogue, NY. He is an Assistant Professor of art at Rhodes College.
