Chris Bennie

SITE LAB Artwork

Chris Bennie ‘Float’ 2023 (working title)

Chris Bennie works with video, sound, photography, and construction to explore the philosophy of everyday life. Authenticity, humility, and humour are features of his artwork proposing new understandings of our shared experience. Water is a common theme, and for SITELAB he is exploring it as a personal and universal metaphor. 

‘I love water. I spend time in it almost every day. In a pool mostly. 

I love the moment when I dive in and feel that otherworldly sensation—buoyancy and mass combining to rupture the banality of gravity. There’s something of the subconscious at work in water.

I train to swim fast and challenge myself to always improve. I contemplate this relationship often, both while in it, and out. What draws me to water? Why does it feel like home? 

But these sensations belie the power of water. Its capacity to level all things is a paradox that is difficult to comprehend. In that regard, it is truly Dionysian.’

For SITELAB Bennie has been exploring how to represent this dilemma in a context that understands it all too well. He invests levity, litheness, and a curious sense of grace in his SITELAB project, contrasting water’s weightiness and life-giving qualities in a geographical context that knows its destructive powers. His practice often aims to do this in unexpected and surprising ways, but mostly by combining seemingly unrelated ideas (filing cabinets, cars, dredgers, landscape paintings, IBC tanks, surf magazine photographs, deities, disasters, tent pegs, waterslides).

About the artist – 

Chris Bennie was born in Invercargill, New Zealand. He attended the Otago School of Art from 1995-97 and the Queensland College of Art from 2001-2004. He earned a Doctorate of Visual Art from Queensland College of Art in 2009 for research titled Video Art, Authenticity and the Spectacle of Contemporary Existence.

Bennie’s work can be characterised by the representation of quotidian subject matter (including objects that have been affected by disasters) in ways that signal new meaning. 

He has exhibited nationally and internationally in major exhibitions including: Revolutions: forms that turn, The Biennale of Sydney (2008); +Plus Factors, Australian Centre of Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2006); Ecstasy: baroque and beyond, University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane (2018); SafARI, Alaska Projects, Sydney (2012); Contemporary Australia: Optimism; Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (2008); sculpture at Scenic World, Blue Mountains (2017); and Control Rooms, Youkobo Artpsace, Tokyo (2014).

Bennie has won many awards including: the Clayton Utz Art Prize, Brisbane (2014); Gold Coast Art Award (2012) and highly commended at the inaugural John Fires Art Award, Sydney (2013). He is the only artist to win the Swell Sculpture Festival twice (2013 and 2019).

What can audiences expect from your SITE LAB installation?
My project is still in development, so, just in case things change, I won’t describe it in much detail, however, I’m working towards something ambitious and hopefully a wee bit funny. It’s based on previous work, but with more moving parts. There’s potentially a water component, and it will have a curious and playful dichotomy that my work always gravitates towards.

 

What do you see is the role of public art in disaster recovery?
From what I saw last year, helping clean Lismore Regional Gallery, removing sodden drawings, photographs and prints, it’s clear that human labour is recovery’s primary currency. Things need to be moved, relocated, and found for any semblance of order to re-emerge.

Art doesn’t have a place within that problem, not really, but the phenomena of a memorial does. A memorial symbolises something of importance after the fact. This is true of all Anzac statues across the length and breadth of this country, as well as major artistic and architectural gestures such as the 911 Memorial and Museum.

While SITE LAB is not a memorial project, it is exploring how art can function in Lismore in 2023. Given time, I believe art can have a place in the redevelopment of a region, town, culture and community. It was true for Christchurch, when, in 2011, following a 6.3 magnitude catastrophic earthquake, spontaneous and playful projects popped up all over the city. Hopefully SITE LAB has something of the same spirit, one that is timely, temporary and lithe, and one that can cause impetus for pause or reflection. If so, then art can sustain a role within the complex machinations of disaster recovery.

 

What artists / artworks have influenced your practice?
Oh, there’s many. My Doctorate focused on the work of Francis Alÿs and Anri Sala for their depictions of banal and quotidian subject matter in ways that represent complex social dynamics and geographical anomalies. They both have substantial video practices which were important to my career at that time.

I’m super fond of a haptic and verbose style of sculpture that has defined the last twenty years, championed by artists like Jessica Stockholder, Sarah Sze, Phoebe Washburn and Phyllida Barlow. Their large scale, walk-in installations are seductive in form, colour, and composition, revealing a truly dynamic approach to spatial poetics that is as absurd as it is beautiful.

Jeff Koon’s Puppy is brilliant.

The weird and wonderful mobile homes of Atelier Van Lieshout were paramount for me in art school and challenged my conception of both art and sculptural forms.

Reconsidering the artwork/art-object conundrum is my main driver. In 2016 I proposed the installation of a 10-meter waterslide to Gold Coast Council for a central Surfers Paradise intersection. I still want to make that work.

Thats only a few, but they help contextualise my fascination with exploring tensions between formal artistic qualities (colour, form, composition) and their poetic or metaphoric potential.