Ben Aitken
June 27 - July 16

REQUEST CATALOGUE;

‘They asked me for a title and I couldn’t think of anything because everything is all over the place so i guess this is the most honest title but now its like an elongated titles as Dale Frank might do’
Exhibition

Artist Benjamin Aitken’s work is a roiling, roaming documentation of his experiences as a survivor of childhood abuse and trauma, of drug addiction and incarceration, and the path towards reclaiming his identity beyond stereotypes or dogma. They are the marks and manifestations of someone dredging for truth and meaning in a well of chaos, tipping the bucket towards us as it returns to and from the void. Exhibited and collected both locally and internationally, Aitken’s impressive and technically brilliant creations are possessed with narratives that are brutal, caustic, amusing, redemptive and often incidental.

Exploring grief, love and heartbreak with a sardonic and cathartic sense of honesty, Aitken looks back with a sense of possession and acceptance, ahead with a glint knowledge. Yet he still holds space for those approaching his work to come prepared to truly look and see, to involve themselves in earnest in the creation, destruction and replication of realities.

In his own words, “Take from this what you will... I choose not to look too closely, rather I feel all of this work is just an archiving... It’s organised chaos, but things do make sense. Sort of like how my life has unfolded.”

Working across a wide range of mediums, including assemblage, painting, drawing, photography and video, Aitken’s work has always emerged from instinctual expression, a frenetic and connected approach to storytelling and making that is at its heart an act of truth telling and retrieval. Wry and razor edged, these tessellations of a life made up of multitudes, are ultimately testimonies of existence and its frictions, grotesque and glorious.

Photography by;
Annika Kafcaloudis