NEW YORK, NY.- her her debuts a major new series of monumental, mixed-media works by New York-based conceptual artist Jane Benson. Benson’s acclaimed practice spans drawing, sound, new media, and sculpture, often appropriating and unraveling existing literature and found objects. her her features a new series of text-based drawings that reframe Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a lyrical exploration of womanhood and rage. Particularly urgent in the current moment, Benson’s work fragments and distorts legibility while amplifying Shelley’s singular voice.
The works in her her are grounded in the chapters of Frankenstein narrated by the monster himself. Benson reads his narrative of self-creation and isolation as a parallel to Shelley’s own, situating the text within a larger feminist discourse. Monumentally scaled drawings on layers of translucent paper rework Shelley’s original manuscript into poetry, color, and sound. Each of these drawings is mounted on radiant iridescent Plexi layered with hand painted matboard in variant shades of yellow, which Benson selects through devised processes that produce a pantone shade from the text.
In some pieces, Benson creates sparse, poetic lines by reproducing only certain words on a page of the manuscript, meticulously copying Shelley’s cursive hand. In others, she removes the letters but draws their “counters” – the open spaces in letters – creating a rhythmic after-image through the negative space of Shelley’s text. In still more, Benson draws only the syllables of the solfge musical scale – do, re, mi, etc. – that she finds within a single chapter to reveal a found score, transforming prose into music. These pieces are accompanied by a recording of the score sung by mezzo soprano Hai-Ting Chinn, which will play on speakers at timed intervals around the gallery. A large-scale print dissolves the text completely into a field of chromatic points, while Benson’s drawings of elm trees reflect Shelley's own sketches in the margins of her manuscript.
While these mechanistic and associative 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. Her seminal work is frequently reduced to a horror story, ignoring its existential complexities and its contribution to the Romantic movement. For Benson, the text speaks directly to the feminist struggle but also articulates environmental concerns and ambivalence toward the incursion of technological innovation in human affairs. These themes are more potent than ever, and Benson’s profound works offer new methods of looking towards the future through engagement with the past.
The exhibition is accompanied by a pamphlet with a new essay on Benson’s work by Molly Murray, M.Phil., Ph.D., Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.
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, Paula Cooper Gallery, Palm Beach (2022); Song for Sebald, 12 Rooms, KEWENIG Gallery, Berlin, Germany (2022); Faux Faux (Lobby Life), Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY (2018); Half-Truths, Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (2017); Finding Baghdad, Boca Raton Museum of Art, Boca Raton, FL (2016); and The Splits, Henry Street Settlement: Abrons Arts Center, New York (2012). In 2012, Benson received a New York City Department of Cultural Affairs commission through the Percent for Art program to create Mirror Globe (Mapping the New World), a large-scale permanent public artwork in a new building in Queens.
Benson has received numerous awards and residencies, including a Fulbright Scholarship, a Pollock-Krasner Grant, and a Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program residency (2022). Her work is held in public collections including Manchester Art Gallery, UK; the New York City School Construction Authority/New York City Department of Cultural Affairs; the Avon Collection, New York; the Soros Foundation, New York; and the Dayton Art Institute, OH. Benson’s first monograph, A Place for Infinite Tuning, was published by Skira and the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, in 2019.
