Jane Benson: her her

her her debuts a major new series of monumental, mixed-media works by acclaimed conceptual artist Jane Benson. Benson’s acclaimed practice spans drawing, sound, new media, and sculpture, often appropriating and unraveling existing literature, artwork, or objects. Inconstant Shade features a new series of text-based drawings that reconfigure Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein into a lyrical exploration of womanhood and rage. Particularly urgent in the current moment, the work fragments and distorts legibility yet amplifies Shelley’s personal voice.

In layered and contemplative works, Benson splits, fractures and skews received sources and structures, only to reassemble them through her investigative practice. Her approach to art-making is methodical, repetitive, and rigorous, requiring the artist’s time and labor to gradually erode entrenched frameworks, revealing novel interpretations and interventions. She returns to themes of patriarchy, displacement, and environmental collapse, exploring the deep historical roots of these processes.

This new body of work centers the portions of Frankenstein narrated by the monster himself, reframing his narrative of self-creation and isolation as Mary’s own and placing the text within a larger feminist discourse. Monumentally scaled drawings produced on layers of translucent paper rework Shelley’s original manuscript in various ways. Benson creates poetic interventions through reproducing only certain words on a page, meticulously copying Shelley’s hand. In others, Benson only reproduces the “counters” – open spaces in letters – creating a rhythmic after-image. In still more, she excises syllables of the musical scale––do, re, mi––to reveal a found score embedded within the text, transforming prose into music. Each work is then mounted on radiant iridescent Plexi in variant shades of yellow, which Benson selects through devised processes that produce a pantone shade from the text.

While these mechanistic transformations abstract Shelley’s text, they also inspire deeper engagement and reconsideration, demanding that viewers encounter powerful lines and images afresh. Central to this work is the idea of the voice – both Shelley’s and the monster’s – as a thing of profound value and a site of potential political intervention. Shelley was often overshadowed by and understood through her relationships with men, and her seminal work is frequently reduced to a horror story, ignoring its existential complexities and contribution to the Romantic movement. For Benson, the text reveals not only the feminist struggle, but also environmental concerns and insights about the role of technological innovation in the human experience. These themes are more potent than ever, and Benson’s subtle and profound works offer nuanced ways of looking at the future through engagement with the past.

Jane Benson (b. 1973, Thornbury, UK) is known for interventions into literature and found objects. Benson’s interdisciplinary and research-based approach spans drawing, sound, new media and sculpture. In layered and contemplative works, Benson splits, fractures and skews received sources and structures, books, fake plants, flags, musical instruments, only to reassemble them through her investigative practice. Her approach to art-making is methodical, repetitive, and rigorous, requiring the artist’s time and labor to gradually erode entrenched frameworks, revealing novel interpretations and interventions. She returns to themes of patriarchy, displacement, and environmental collapse, exploring the deep historical roots of these processes.

Recent notable one-person exhibitions include “Song of the Dodo”, Gallery Shilla, Seoul (2024), “Jane Benson: re-assembly" (2022), Paula Cooper Gallery, Palm Beach, “Song for Sebald, 12 Rooms” (2022), KEWENIG Gallery, Berlin, Germany, “Half-Truths”, Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati (2017), “Finding Baghdad” (2016), Boco Raton Museum of Art, Boca Raton, FL, “Faux Faux (Lobby Life)” (2018), Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY, “The Splits” (2012), and Henry Street Settlement: Abrons Art Center, New York. And in 2012 Benson received a New York City Department of Cultural Affairs commission, through the Percent for Art program, to create a large-scale permanent public artwork in a new building in Queens. Mirror Globe (Mapping the New World).

She has been the recipient of numerous awards and residencies including the Fulbright Scholarship, the Pollack-Krasner Grant and the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program Residency (2022). Her work is included in public collections such as Manchester Art Gallery, UK, New York City School Construction Authority/ New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the Avon Collection, New York, the Soros Foundation, New York and Dayton Art Institute, OH. Benson’s first Monograph, “A Place for Infinite Tuning” was published by Skira and The Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati in 2019.