Paul Jeffreys & Benjamin Jurgensen

September 2007

While we know its always impossible to look without judgment, hacking through media and image and party lines and propaganda and selective information becomes ever more difficult as those things feed and multiply, getting in the way of the “finding out”. So maybe now is the time to try – to investigate for the sake of gathering real information, whatever its nature. Keeping in mind that, as art, the investigation is not activism and is not an act. That what is left after the investigation – the image, the sound, and the movement – is political and personal, though, cannot be denied. Presented in the form of sculptural objects and photographs, conscious inaction comes together as the investigations of two young artists into sub cultural groups and spaces and their purchase within the mainstream.

Benjamin Jurgensen explores relationships through the grouping and manipulation of fabricated representations of recognizable objects. Constructed of MDF and wood, the objects are arranged to interact with one another and to suggest narratives. The artist’s exploration of our dependence on defining ourselves within discreet groups through associated material commodities is conveyed through themes like trust, intimacy, balance, necessity, expectation, purpose, insecurity, and love. Jurgensen’s current group of works investigates manufactured youth cultures and the attendant possessions that confer value on an individual. Simultaneously throwaway items and objects of desire and distinction, the links made between groupings of objects question concepts of structure, wealth, status, destruction and danger.

Through unpeopled photographs of strip joints and hunt clubs/hunting trophy rooms, Paul Jeffreys investigates spaces dominated by what are seen as basic urges of that particular type of masculinity that our society would have us believe is the definition of “the masculine.” Neither praise nor condemnation, the photographs highlight what is highly constructed and contrived in these images and make room for the viewer to enter onto the stage of these unnatural spaces. The questions that arise related to the relationship between the “trophies” and the “man’s man” and the spaces in which they co-exist, are not as easy to answer as they might at first seem.