I am an Artist: Ben Severns
Why are you an artist?
I feel like being an artist is really the only thing that I can do that makes complete sense to me. It’s a lot of physical, mental, and emotional work, and it exhausts me, but I’m addicted. I love the intellectual engagement that theory and criticism have. I’ve always had a visual mind, I’ve always had an imagination that took me on journeys. When I was a child, I did not have many friends and so I just spent hours alone, making my own world, inside of my room. It’s took me a while to realize that art was a real career that I could and should pursue. Once I started my education at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, I began to really fully appreciate what it meant to be an artist in the world and how to do that.
Can you talk about your work? What is your vision?
My work pulls inspiration from a number of different places. Science, technology, childhood, memory, literature, music, and independent films all play key rolls in the development of my work. I try to always have two levels to my work. The visual component and the conceptual framework behind the work always play off of each other, and both are influenced by similar material. I am still trying to define exactly what the whole of my vision entails. I just know that it is in part a personal exercise, as I attempt to figure this whole life thing out, but at the same time, I try to make the personal components are so abstracted that any viewer-participant could engage with the work and come to their own conclusions.
Which is your favorite medium and why?
I started my artistic life as a photographer. Then I became a sculptor. And now I’ve realized that I really don’t have a “favorite” medium. I just use the the medium best suited to addressing the questions, emotions, topics that whatever the current piece I am working on contains. I like working in sound. I like working sculpturally. I really have a soft spot for photography. Drawing is really neat. Video’s a pretty great thing too. Maybe that’s why I’m so drawn to installation. Installation art in my head is not just art in a space, but rather a space as a piece of art.
What does the line symbolize in your work?
Talk about a loaded question….. The line is several things to me. It is a path for the viewer-participant and I to mentally move through the piece. It’s a way for the disparate elements of my work to communicate with each other on both formal, as well as conceptual grounds. There are other things, but it’s difficult to put in to words. It’s just a feeling.
Has any great work of art made you extremely emotional? If so which one and why?
Not one piece, but Huang Yong Ping’s retrospective at the Walker Art Center really still to this day, 5 years later, effects me at an incredibly visceral level. He is a French artist, born in China. He combines many different sorts of media and cultural influences. He works with many different unorthodox materials, like live snakes, scorpions, turtles, and spiders. He was also a founding member of the Xiamen Dada group in China in the 1980s. It’s difficult for me to put words to why it effects me in the way it does, but it just gets to me at a “gut” level. When I look at his work, it just makes sense. It has a wonderful mix of the intellectual abstraction of Dada (specifically, in my mind similar to the Zurich Dada group) combined with Chinese tradition and culture.
There’s just something wonderful and raw in it.
What is the art scene like in Minnesota?
Oh art in Minnesota is fantastic! We have many many many galleries in the Twin Cities, ranging from frame shops that also sell art, to studio-galleries that just pop up and show some very innovative work (ala Sellout Gallery (RIP)), to alternative spaces that are interested in the art that people are making right now (like Art of This), to larger art centers like the Walker, Midway, Franklin Art Works.
The Walker also runs a website www.mnartists.org, that is basically a free gallery online for Minnesota artists to exhibit their work and network.
On top of that, we have schools (both high school and college) that have very innovative, working artists as instructors.
AND
We have several philanthropic organizations that support art through grants and fellowships, like the McKnight Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, the Bush Foundation, and Minnesota State Arts Board.
Minnesota is a wonderful place to live as an artist!
What is the role of the artist in our society?
As artists, we are called to comment on, and discuss the society that we live in. We are also sometimes asked to tell everyone that everything will be ok, and that beautiful things still exist. We are asked to be innovative, to not just settle for the norm, but rather to define what the new normal will be. That’s what being an artist is for me at least.
Where do you see yourself as an artist in 5 years?
At the moment actually, I am applying to graduate schools, and after grad school, I would like to at least in part teach at a collegiate level. I would also like to see myself exhibiting at the same or greater rate than I am now (the past 3 years each have had an average of 9 shows a year). I also would really like to begin curating even more than I am now.
What are your ultimate goals as an artist?
Ultimate artistic goals of mine are really fluid at the moment. They include such hits as “get a job that affords me the time to actually make”, but I also want to find some method of addressing more wholly the idea of transcendence of person to achieving and realizing memory. It’s a confusing idea that require hand gestures to fully explain….
What does art mean to you?
It’s my attempt to make sense of the contemporary human condition and how I fit in to it.
