Exhibition Reception | “Surface Potential”

Associate Professor Benjamin Britton has an exhibition at the Performing Arts Center. The installation of four paintings, titled “surface potential”, is on view at the UGA Performing Arts Center (PAC) Lobby Gallery, which is free and open to the public weekdays between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m.

This lobby gallery exhibition is part of an ongoing collaboration between the UGA Performing Arts Center and members of the drawing and painting faculty of the Lamar Dodd School of Art, including previous shows by Director Joseph Peragine and Professor Margaret Morrison.

A reception will be held at the PAC Lobby Gallery Wednesday, January 29th at 5 p.m.

The paintings are on view until Aug. 8, 2025.

About the Exhibition

The paintings make an invitation to look through a colorful and peculiar layering of landscape, perspectival hard-edge abstract forms, and trompe l’oeil gouges containing representational vignettes that float on top of the paintings. In these works, the act of looking is foregrounded through the mutability of the space and dizzying changes in the conditions of the paint application; speed, direction, pressure, and temperature. The revelatory observance of something huge seems to be on offer because of the scale and subject, but instead of the declarative production of an encounter with the external sublime, one is propelled into a very personal and subjective navigation of representation and abstraction.

Britton’s recent work is about “how it looks to think about the feeling of a place” in an entanglement of the past, present, and future. In another sense it is about future projections and the phenomenal experience of the present. The paintings present the duration of time as a continuous relation of desire between a human consciousness and its ecology. Through the idiosyncratic visuality of the work, they also present a provocation to think about why a better world seems unreadable to us.

Artist Biography

Benjamin Britton is a painter who was born in 1976 and grew up in the Pacific Northwest. He received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts, NY in 1999 and his MFA in painting from UCLA in 2008. His work has been shown primarily in New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Atlanta. His paintings are in the collections of the High Museum, the Ballinglen Museum of Fine Art, and the West Collection. Britton’s work has been reviewed in Art in America and the LA Times, among others. Britton has had solo shows at Marcia Wood Gallery in Atlanta, Ruth Bachofner Gallery in Santa Monica, and Frederieke Taylor Gallery in New York, among others. He is a recipient of the Chiaro Award in painting, an Artist-in-Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, CA, a recipient of an Artist Fellowship from the Ballinglen Arts Foundation in Ballycastle, Ireland, and a J.B. Blunk Residency from the Lucid Art Foundation in Inverness, CA. He teaches painting at the University of Georgia in Athens, GA.