Artist Statement Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air.”
Our lives and the conditions that shape them are fundamentally unstable and finite. Ambiguity and complexity are intrinsic to the symbols and milestones embedded in our collective psyche. 164 years after the communist manifesto, the work in “Bubble Entendre” reacts to the turbulent quakes and icons of capitalism with a sense of levity, and with the acknowledgement of what Johanna Drucker has coined “complicity”. Moreover, the work here aspires to a sense of exuberance and eccentricity typically avoided in galleries today. The cool, aloof, quiet, and minimal gestures of contemporary privilege are passed up here, in favor of something more playful, and ultimately more clumsy and vulnerable.
Bio By all accounts, Benjamin Lipkin is a dirtbag-lunatic-dilettante, and a coward, but if you trust him even a little bit (you shouldn’t), you may find yourself in some interesting places. One of which is his home studio, a former convent occupying several floors above a neighborhood school on New York’s Upper West Side. Adorned by the work of Keith Haring, it’s stairwells lead unsuspecting visitors to a vast, multi-tiered roof garden, and a network of inspired dwellings he shares with writers, artists, and activists. From this fertile position, his deep roots in photography, printmaking, and sculpture have been well-nurtured. But before settling in New York, he lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and after graduating in 2004, Portland, Oregon, where in addition to working as a full-time web developer, he worked and volunteered with arts non-profits, community media outlets, and an “organic” architecture studio. He later moved to Chicago where he completed his MFA and began cultivating a foundation of pessimism and ambivalence that continues to support his ongoing optimism and exuberance.