Kaleidoscopic No. 4: Benedict Scheuer
On mindfulness, vividness, and wilderness..
Leonardo Bravo
Hi, Benedict, it’s Leonardo, and I am connecting from Berlin and you are in Columbus, Ohio. It’s the American Midwest to Northern Europe (laugh) and wonderful to be here. I have been following your work and eager to have a conversation as I'm fascinated by its multiple dimensionalities and how they are expressed through your practice. I'd love to start with your overall framing of your practice.
Benedict Scheuer
Okay, perfect. I like to begin describing my artistic practice really as an extension of a mindfulness practice that's all permeating, and so within that space, I am particularly interested in lines. I think lines are this incredibly sensitive act of making a mark and they're this enduring moment in time where they're really picking up on the environment around everything from temperature to physical, to sounds, to things of that nature. And then as well as like my own body and internal landscape. So lines are sort of acting as this mysterious bottleneck wherein these forces are kind of coming together and getting contained and the vibration and the squiggle and the extension of the line. And so within that space, I'm creating these images typically on silk of late, though that could potentially shift at any moment, I think.
Benedict Scheuer
But yeah, working on silk the images that I'm making are all intuitive. They're not pre-planned. I work improvisationally and that's just a way of kind of honoring the moment and the sensitivity of that moment. And so within that space, a lot of the work does kind of fall into certain camps of imagery. Often the human body is present. Lately a lot of imagery of lungs or rib cages and a lot of nature and a lot of the garden. I love to garden and I breed dahlias. And so that falls into the work as well. I've also been, especially this summer, really tapped into just the bird sounds outside the studio and feel as if those acoustics are also kind of jumping into the work as well. And so within that space, I really enjoy seeing what comes out of the work and not having a pre-planned sort of approach to it.
Benedict Scheuer
Silk is also a really beautiful product, not product…a beautiful material to work with. And it's really captivated me. I fell into that material sort of accidentally. I couldn't really tell you why I started working on it, in the process that I'm using. But it's sensitive to air currents. The body, if you walk past it, the silks will flutter as they hang on the wall or space. They also come from this beautiful moment of transformation where-in silk worms are utilizing this material that they're creating from leaves. So it's like leaf plant matter and animal matter kind of simultaneously coexisting. And that's used in this moment of transformation. There are a lot of things that attract me to silk. That's kind of some general points: largely working on silk, really fascinated with drawing in this intuitive process that to me, it's a extension of mindfulness.
Leonardo Bravo
I love the way you talk about this sense of almost a vibrational quality to the work. You speak about sensitivity and I think about the various registers or this attunement to the world around us, and the way in which we open ourselves up to that perception. What experiences have led you to connecting to the natural world and these processes and these notions of interdependence and transformation? Has that been a gradual process or something that over time you've become more aware to it?
Benedict Scheuer
Yeah, I think there's a natural pull. Originally I grew up in northern Minnesota and my family was very much about nature and being outside. And so I was just familiar and comfortable in that space to begin with. And as I got older, I think a huge reason that I started working and making work in particular was trying to find some expression for queerness, which I was suppressing. And so for me, that looked like entering nature spaces, which I felt innately comfortable in, and doing self portrait photography. And so that's how I started my practice. So I was kind of working in that space and creating these expressions of self that were shocking to my own self, and allowing me this sense of liberation and this almost connection to this intrinsic part of myself.
Benedict Scheuer
And as I moved forward, I went to undergrad and I studied environmental studies and got really interested in the nature culture dichotomy and sort of this larger question of, what is wilderness and what does it mean to be connected to nature or wilderness? Is this a choice? Is this an innate thing that we're in; where that is a possibility within us as humans? So within these larger questions surfacing, I've kind of always been tapped into this idea of wilderness as a state of mind. And for me, as I've progressed and grown, I've learned about meditation and mindfulness and those sort of things tapped into these ideas of wilderness. And from there I've been able to dig in more deeply and more intentionally—and a lot more soft as well—where I'm really just trying to enter a state of mind that is connected to self and environment at the same time, and using that as a place to work from.
Leonardo Bravo
That's beautiful. I grew up in the south of Chile, a place where the weather and nature is very much like the pacific Northwest. So the weather is unforgiving. It's rough but it's beautiful. And landscape and wilderness is ever present. You feel it, you feel that wind, you feel the bird song. Even as a kid I was conscious of these elemental states of nature. And very recently, we've been in Berlin and it’s very much like Minneapolis, like that part of Minnesota and the midwest, filled with lakes. The lakes just outside of the city are so naturally wild, and there's these very direct connections to bodies of water, to the surroundings. During the summer, we went to one of these lakes. We were there most of the day, and late into the day towards the evening when the sun was going down, I went swimming in this beautiful lake (completely naked), with very few people around. And I swear I had a communal and spiritual kind of experience as the sun was going down. I felt almost body less, like the sense of my body had let go. It was purely like a feeling beyond your sense of consciousness. This is what is meant I guess when true transcendence happens. And I was conscious, yet felt like there was some major shift happening between my relationship as a physical entity to this body of water, to the colors, to the sun, you know? So I feel like I understand very much what you are talking about.
Benedict Scheuer
Absolutely. It's interesting to hear about these moments where we feel a deep sense of connection or, I guess transcendence is an interesting word, cause I would describe the experience as dispersion or a full connection to things sensorially. I've been really thinking about lately, like what is in the ingredients for a moment like that, because they feel very unexpected when I encounter them. And they can be encompassed in these sort of like, grand moments. And also these like really quiet spaces. Like just the other day I was sitting on the porch and looking at the garden and I was reading, and I look up from my book, and the light was just slanting through the sky, and it just felt, everything felt so incredibly vivid and I look at this scene every day!
Benedict Scheuer
But that vividness felt so unreal, and as if it was just like waiting to be noticed. And I think that a lot of what I'm trying to do within my life, where the practice is sort of wrapped in, is how do I increase that for myself and how, that sort of -- even that language I struggle with -- striving for this magic that exists. Cause I think that in a way it should, I wish it could…it is naturally floating in and out, Right? And drawing is a space that really is an intentional practicing ground for me in that a drawing is so vividly alive. And to draw something too is the one point in time where like, as an artist, you are existing with the work as it's creating and everything is totally new, and you can’t experience that again after the work has been created.
Leonardo Bravo
Let's talk specifically about some of the works. You were recently invited to the Front Triennial 2022 at the Akron Museum and also the Belle Isle Viewing Room exhibition you had in Michigan.
Benedict Scheuer
I'll start with the Front stuff. I was essentially offered the opportunity to create a silk specifically for the Akron Museum. They have a space between two of the galleries, there's this very large threshold that is walked through. It's a little more than 15 feet tall and maybe six feet wide. And it was an opportunity to create a silk that could fit into that space, and thinking through it, what ultimately came through is this very large silk, 15 feet tall, 45 inches wide, depicting this very tall, solitary bird that fills that whole silk with six large orange tears kind of dripping down its body. And as people come into this space, they're kind of struck by this rich royal blue color, the warm tones of this bird, and they're offered the opportunity to walk through it and pass through it.
Benedict Scheuer
And they can feel the silk against their skin. this satiny gorgeous texture, and they also get to interact with light in that way too. As light hits it, this quality of the material, so shimmery and there's a transparency to it. If you full body walk into it, you can still see through and you can feel this material running up your body as you pass. So for me, that piece came as a surprise. One, that was the largest piece that I'd made to date, so it was a challenge in that way, but also I made a few silks as attempts at trying to create something that would fill the space and as I'm working improvisationally, I'm trying to honor that, I'm trying to not create something premeditated, and so they all feel wildly different from each other. But the piece that came out ended up being very tapped into my breathing, where each line of the wing is really a line of my own breath captured into this meditative repetition. And from there the image just kind of unfolded. And I looked at it in my studio, I started crying. And so I was just like, okay, this is, this is the piece.
Leonardo Bravo
Can you share more about the relationship between your meditation practice, the breathing and the activation of the drawing and work itself.
Benedict Scheuer
Absolutely. So when I start a drawing, I always start with meditation. I time it at 20 minutes typically and so I do that and I can tell typically if I don't do this before, there's a different quality to the line, there's a different way of entering the work. But I begin with that, and as I'm working, the breath is very evident and very prominent, feels very rich. And the bird sound is so evident as well, especially during the making of this work, and so I feel like within those two things, those two simple things kind of converging, there's this moment that emerges, which is the actual drawing itself. And it does feel to me like it is a recording. And I do think that lines are sort of this overlooked miracle wherein like, they really do hold how I'm feeling every single day.
Leonardo Bravo
I also wanna hear a little bit about your sense of color, because again, that word, vividness there... The colors feel saturated and that might be because of the quality of doing this on silk. But I love the pinks with some of the teals and the oranges. You really are so astute in the way color responds and activates, and becomes I would say a source of information.
Benedict Scheuer
Yeah. Color is absolutely mysterious to me.
Benedict Scheuer
I typically work by having just a gut instinct about which color I want to begin with, and that sort of dictates everything else moving forward. And for me, that usually is a lot of just quiet looking and honestly, but sometimes I will have, I'll be stuck with the problem, Right. And it'll be like, so we put this here, and how do we balance that? I think balance is like a huge thing that I'm constantly thinking about within composition and color and the weight of color and how things are performing in that way. But then there's also these moments where I will just feel so strongly that a certain color needs to be applied. And for me, that appears as I'm looking at a drawing or an image and process, I'll just see the color that needs to happen next.
Benedict Scheuer
It is just present in how I'm interacting with the work, and sometimes that feels bodily, and sometimes it will be like I feel an intensity of magenta, like literally in my chest, and I'm staring at the center of this work, and it's like, Okay, I think magenta is the move here! So I'm trying to be open to sensation in that space within my own body, trying to just indicate what comes next. And then I also like to work very quickly as well, where it is just like I'm working feverishly and I'm filling in colors and instinctually, I just immediately click into the next color that needs to come, and I try not to second guess it, and sometimes I'll grab the wrong color because I'm working so quickly, and then that becomes a new element of trying to figure things out. So it really is like a combination of this intuition and accident and luck as well. I think those three things are happening.
Leonardo Bravo
I'm looking at your Belle Isle Viewing Room images and I love the relationship between each one of these works. Do you see them as standalone pieces, or are there perhaps intensities that kind of follow each other or map along sort of this larger, what I would call cosmologies?
Benedict Scheuer
I think that in the titling of the show as Spring Drawings, I really wanted the work to exist within a period of time, because I think, or I've noticed that when I'm working, I will tap into something for myself that feels distinctly related to each other. So it's like I could create a series of five silks in a week, and they could all feel very, they could feel like they're just like one larger…
Benedict Scheuer
Image that is sort of connected to each other. And I'll just be working within that space. And when I catch that, it feels great, and I'm in the studio and I'm ready to just make the next thing. In that way, it feels like the moment has been extended, and so it's whatever this energy is, whatever this experience of making, it feels related to each other. So all the silks that are in that exhibition were made in the spring, very direct, like spring drawings. These were made in the same period of time, and I just wanted to witness what that experience could be, and what are these larger connections over an even greater period of time. I think there are many similarities or there are certain motifs that appear throughout the work, like the extended body, like a body at leisure resting, that also feels like a landscape. There are certain colors that feel repetitious and they continue to meet into the space. So yeah, it feels like they all belong to each other, and it would feel very strange for me to then like, drop in a silk from a year ago into the mix. I think they would feel so absolutely different from each other.
Leonardo Bravo
I'm trying to frame this question, so let me try to articulate it. There's a sense, I mean, you spoke about a space of liberation related to queerness and to see that in a very expansive sense of how it is expressed or defined through your work, through your practice. I also have a feeling that the thoughtfulness you bring to your work, you call forth this attention to an expansiveness of time and the care that is allowed and needed for that.
Leonardo Bravo
It points to an awareness of what it takes to slow yourself down as an individual, to have a greater sense of connection to your surroundings, and particularly the natural world, and how to embed those differences of rhythm and time into the way you work and your own perceptive faculties. That's a very broad thing, but I'm perceiving that beyond just the work itself, that there's a clear attempt from your end to carve out that space, that beautiful space of perception and awareness.
Benedict Scheuer
As you're talking, the thought that started forming in my mind within this space of identity and also like this space of finding drawings is really, yeah It's about this space of acceptance, and like being open to receiving and also acknowledging what already is there. Even within drawing, I think that I often take things from that experience and they can then be applied to my everyday life or vice versa. It's not about this larger output where I'm trying to achieve a certain image or this certain grand thing. It really is just about this daily practice of being tapped into this ecosystem, wherein like, my role in the ecosystem in the same way that like a pollinator is like pollinating.
Benedict Scheuer
My role is just to be present also to the world and then produce what I produce. It's just about this earnest desire to be present, to be actively involved, to allow what is coming in and out, within my own self and within the work.
Benedict Scheuer
I read this book recently by Richard O. Prum, it's called The Evolution of Beauty, and it's all about birds and evolution.
The Evolution of Beauty, Richard O. Prum
“…ornament evolves because individuals have the capacity, and the freedom, to choose their mates, and they choose the mates whose ornaments they prefer. In the process of choosing what they like, choosers evolutionarily transform both the objects of theirs desires and the form of their own desires. It is a true coevolutionary dance between beauty and desire.”
Benedict Scheuer
There's a lot within it that I found really interesting and related to a studio practice wherein essentially this book is using examples of bird phenology. So, like the beauty of feathers and how this elaborate beauty has evolved and it's evolved through female mate choice and genuinely this preference for aesthetics is what he's arguing for. And so you get into these feedback loops over time as aesthetics of beauty really evolve into these elaborate specified ways that are specific for a species of bird. And so I think within like the larger scope of humanity, I'm curious what that umbrella is. And then also like the little umbrella of the studio. And I'm really excited about the opportunity to be an artist who found art young and is able then to keep producing work in the studio in this little vacuum of the studio that has its pores as well. And to be making over the course of 60 years and really pushing that evolution and defining that aesthetic and letting it evolve and grow in a way that will feel earnest. I think the goal at the end of the day is to like, create something that feels absolutely true. And I think that that is hopefully gonna happen.
Leonardo Bravo
Well, there's such a sense of authenticity to that pursuit because you're looking at entire arc of time. Because it's ultimately the search. So what is next? What are you planning next after this recent group of exhibitions and perhaps still working with the same materials or thinking about other materiality?
Benedict Scheuer
Yeah. I have kind of taken all the work that I've made over the past months or so, and I've just been reflecting on it and deciding. I guess the question for myself is like, if I were to put some limitations on my work just to see what that could do for me, what would those limitations be and how can I choose the limitation that feels earnest and good. And so I've been naturally just really tapping my breath into these wing like shapes and so I've just been pushing full force into exploration of that. Like really trying to make compositions, images that work from the space of very directly trying to be tapped into my breathing as opposed to kind of the way that was accidentally happening. I'm trying to do that more intentionally.
Benedict Scheuer
And so it's been interesting and I'm excited where things are going. I see the images right now, sort of in some ways abstracting. But then I've been talking with friends and I don't know if abstraction is the right term because yes, like the body no longer really feels as strictly like the body or wings or flowers or whatever there, but they feel like instead of like abstraction, they're more converging into each other. And so it's not like a simplification of the body really. It's like an expansion of the body where it's like, these are lungs, but they're also wings, but they're also rib cages and they're also... So there's this multiplicity that's evolving. So I'm exploring that and that's very exciting. I'm also getting into some sewing as well, so I've made some soft sculptures in the past with silk and with other materials, and I'm interested in pushing that a little bit more and seeing if some of these older ideas, can be reinvigorated into new forms or evolutions of what they've done.
Leonardo Bravo
Well Benedict, this has been such a treat to talk to you and I so look forward to staying in touch. And I would love at some point to bring your work to Berlin. I think it would be so wonderful to have an opportunity to show it here. So we will continue to be in touch about that
Benedict Scheuer
Fantastic. Yeah, I really enjoyed the conversation and getting to meet you and just yeah, being part of this larger project that you're doing, which I think is really exciting.
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