Benny FerdmanBioAs a collector of materials and stories from our human, natural and cultural landscape, artist Benny Ferdman reinterprets images and tales to reclaim wonder in everyday life. His paintings, sculptures and installations are animated by a mix of folkloric and natural forms, ancient text, the past, the present, time and transformation. His art often draws on themes of heritage, spirituality, and the human connection to nature, interpreting these sources and ideas through contemporary art practices.
Ferdman’s work incorporates painting, drawing, assemblage and mixed media. He creates layered, textured pieces that balance the earthbound and mystical with the modern, creating a unique visual language that resonates with viewers on an aesthetic, visceral and symbolic level. Woven throughout is a great reverence for the natural world and an increasingly urgent message around collective ecological responsibility. Benny Ferdman received his BFA from Massachusetts College of Art. He currently lives in Los Angeles and is Co-founder and Artistic Director of Creative Ways, an organization that creates public art, exhibitions, multi-media installations, interdisciplinary arts programming and educational curricula nationally and across the globe. www.creativeways.org. He is also Co-Founder/Co-Director of Camp Wildcraft--an art and nature summer camp in Los Angeles whose mission is to "grow curious, creative, confident and caring kids who feel at home in nature." www.campwildcraft.com About my workAn enduring visual archive accompanies me into the hills and fields and canyons that have become my studio over the past years, forming a symbolic library that I transform and am transformed by. This visual language is informed by imagery gathered and reinterpreted from pages of old manuscripts and rare archival photographs from Eastern Europe, my ancestral home, the diverse landscapes I wander, and encounters I have along the way. Focusing on the nexus between history, nature and culture, my eyes and ears are attuned to the stories revealed. As a collector of materials found in the wild: raw clay from the hills of Topanga, seedpods, fossils, gnarled branches–my artwork juxtaposes and reinterprets these objects through painting, sculpture and assemblage, to reclaim wonder in everyday life. My process is both a reflection and reconciliation. Often, we cannot go forward without looking backward.
To contact Benny please email at [email protected]
Additional projects can be seen at www.creativeways.org
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