Originally from Santa Fe, New Mexico, Ben moved to Brooklyn, NY right after college where he studied printmaking and animation. He worked various odd jobs as a printmaker and designer, one of them being a graphic designer for hip-hop mogul Fab 5 Freddy. This placed him deep in the realms of hip-hop and New York City street culture, which heavily influenced his artwork. During this time, Ben expanded his portfolio in screen printing, painting, and animation. He received his MFA from California College of the Arts, and is now working as a Los Angeles-based artist applying his skills in music videos, printmaking, and experimental film. His work has have been showcased in numerous exhibitions and events across the United States and internationally, including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Las Vegas Film Festival, and The Contemporary Jewish Museum.
In my films, I paint on both sampled film and my own film. I react to the film and its memories, and then push the hidden gesture through with my own hand. I am not painting or drawing an exact replica of this movement predetermined by another filmmaker. I am editing and exaggerating in order to emphasize a particular shade of reality—the one of my choice.
I then create works that best accentuate the animation’s verse. I combine my skill set into a statement that involves all my labors: sculpture, drawing, painting, and printmaking. I work each medium diligently and respond to the substance each one offers, amplifying animation’s exclusive ability to break the human condition down to the split second.
All of my works fall under the rubric of labor—labor in the terms of quotidian employment, but mostly in the larger context of your personal betterment. The more you put into it- repetition, ingesting and synthesizing- the stronger your will and satisfaction. Observing a journey through a moral terrain without heroes; its inner turmoil, selflessness and selfishness, those who react to it, those who conform to it. Each animation and accompanying works are to some extent, a ballad for each journey. Defining the moment when experience becomes knowledge, you stop shifting agency and you discover where you stand in regards to suffering, desire, ethics, and responsibility.