Perched within the cavernous maw of the Suite Gallery is a strange mass: a conglomeration of rigidly sutured, bone-white produce boxes, emptied of cargo and purpose – their corrugated ghostly bodies, slowly leeched of color and branding by years spent under a vampiric sun. Like an oversized, albinic pearl, it hangs heavy – boldly reflecting...
Perched within the cavernous maw of the Suite Gallery is a strange mass: a conglomeration of rigidly sutured, bone-white produce boxes, emptied of cargo and purpose – their corrugated ghostly bodies, slowly leeched of color and branding by years spent under a vampiric sun. Like an oversized, albinic pearl, it hangs heavy – boldly reflecting back the gallery wall’s hungry gaze, unrelenting in its withholding all that lies within…
(WITH)HOLDING PATTERNS is a site-specific installation by Dodd MFA Candidate Adah Bennion that explores through scale, modularity, and mimetic material plasticity the anxieties of perception, identity, and longing. Working with salvaged materials in multiples, Bennion indulges in her compulsion to gather and save – a vestigial coping strategy born of a multigenerational practice of resourcefulness, resilience, and endurance – of survival – while also making reference to shared cultural experiences of displacement, redundancy, and obsolescence – fears of death and being forgotten.
Through her use and manipulation of “lowly” waste materials such as the cardboard produce boxes and the tattered plastic waste bin liners, Bennion seeks to subvert standardized notions of categorization, qualification, and deservedness while engaging ideas of concealment, duty, and desire. (WITH)HOLDING PATTERNS is the physical aggregate of a lifetime of adaptive proclivities and anxious accumulation that seeks to unpack our underlying attachments to meaning, matter, and belonging.
