1970-‘73 Calgary, New York, Toronto, London
’New York’
Headline in The Albertan:
‘Artist Shows everywhere but Calgary’
“The pieces for the New York Show follow one of two themes: city scapes and clouds. All the city scapes are mounted on bases, mostly plexiglass, which are so meticulously mitred and fitted together that they look as though they are one cast piece. * Shining city towers (tubular sections of chrome coated bronze or clear plexiglass) rise from a cutout in a horizontal ground of coloured plexiglass.
Benjamin thrives on the urban environment which he says he finds very exciting. Not just the majestic proportions of contemporary buildings, but “the great lorries with decorative design on them and the huge oil storage tanks, also with huge designs on them.” He calls the cityscapes and the two-tower monuments of the same series, his Neon City work.
The prairies and their vastness have greatly affected Benjamin, who is completing his second year in Calgary as a professor at the university. He finds the hugeness of the western sky immensely beautiful. “It affects my mood,” he says. “…the way the sky is in the morning when I get up almost determines the kind of day I’m going to have.”
The pieces in his Nimbus series are a result of these feelings. They are cloud shapes cut from Plexiglass sheet and contoured by many hours of sanding with wet and dry sand-paper. The cloud is caught and held stationary on a base. The largest…measures about four feet at the base and is about three feet high. It weighs 80 pounds and is tapered from the 2- inch base to a knife-edge athe the top, the result of some 200 hours of hand work…
Benjamin enjoys the present. He believes in using contemporary materials and methods like chrome and plexiglass and having some of his work prefabricated. “When I first started doing sculpture,” he says, “ I worked a lot in stone. But stone just has no interest for me at all now.”
His only characteristic which might be called old fashioned is his insistence on perfection…Benjamin is no garret artist. He feels himself very strongly involved in the social issues of our time and is stimulated by social change. He seems naturally quiet when he speaks, leaves half his thought unspoken, yet suggested. “
Wendy Woodford, Albertan Arts editor, Saturday February 28th, 1970
( * Note: The constructed Perspex bases were made by Nancy Patterson, who also did most of the work on the acrylic Nimbus Cloud forms, and other Perspex pieces )
The Albertan, 1970
The polished metal sections of the sculpture were being made in Vancouver at a company specialising in brewery fittings; then all plans had to be radically altered when a strike suddenly happened at the works, followed by a series of mistakes in shipping instructions; the metal parts ended up in a boxcar on a rail siding in LA, and had to be forwarded by air freight to New York.
A prolonged postal strike started on the day the invitations were sent out and the private view was on St. Patrick’s Day, a strange date for the gallery directors to select for a major event. The big annual parade stops all the traffic in Central Manhattan, including rubbish trucks that should have picked up the broken packing crates, the metal sections were shipped in. Some pieces were not assembled by the time the caterers arrived with trestle tables and champagne buckets; they collided with the rubbish collection in the Madison Avenue doorway, just as the first guests were arriving.
Everything that could possibly go wrong, did so, and only three of the larger Nimbus Series were ready in time to be assembled for the exhibition.
N.Y. ‘Cascade Smoke Plumes’
N.Y. N.Y
Benjamin was fascinated by the tall funnels emitting smoke that he saw in the New York streets where the underground works were taking place. Because the things were potential traffic hazards, the metal tubes were painted incongruous, bright colours, that were striking in the smelly chaos of the city streets. However, the oddities remained in his favourite image repertoire, along with the pyramids, puddings and compases, re-used many times over the years…particularly in the evocative multiplate, Borderline Images etching suite, produced in1979, with Master Printer Glenn Mingham some years after his return to London, He re-used the favoured Smoke Plumes in many other works and media, particularly with pencil and graphite.
Smoke Plumes - pencil drawing
Nimbus Arch, Perspex and stainless steel, Mira Goddard Gallery, Toronto, 1970