An installation by Ben Butler

January 20–May 13

This installation, Exchange, grew at the invitation of Brookfield, from a previous installation by Ben Butler commissioned by Rice University Art Gallery. Although that installation was site specific and temporary, as is this installation, the 10,000 hand cut sticks of poplar wood have been reassembled using 30,000 hand cut matchsticks tapped into drilled holes. Roughly 300 two-dimensional grids, originally assembled in the artist’s Memphis studio, were intuitively assembled in this space to form a brand new sprawling installation of approximately 1,500 square feet.

Noting the quantity of materials and labor involved, however, does not begin to describe the nature of this piece. In contrast to the standardization of the units, the installation grew organically, the artist subtly manipulating the ever-enlarging forms by editing, by prioritizing negative space, and, in a sense, by pruning and replanting. As Butler reflects, “This piece is a meditation on structure and space. At its core is a beautiful contradiction — the grid is entirely systematized, predictable and rigid, and yet it accumulates into a form without definition, wild, amorphous, and dynamic. The complexity of this relationship is what interests me. It is a complexity that reveals itself slowly over time, as the scale of the form requires a physical exploration of its space. It manipulates the viewer’s movement and encourages a sense of discovery.”

Butler’s work is a seeming contradiction, a tense balance of the pattern and precision of the grid, and the organic forms that grow from it. It is clearly hand-built and seemingly static, yet renders waves and undulations as if blown by the wind. The spaces between are filled by the unique vocabulary of each viewer, and the experience of passage is continuously refreshed. Nothing is in fact static, and as the title suggests, there is an exchange between two worlds, the predictable and the dynamic, as the meanings of these words shift and even trade places. Exchange celebrates the one constant in our lives, change. It collects the simple until it is complex, yet simultaneously redefines the complex as something that is simple.

Curated by Sally Reynolds

In cooperation with the artist and Rice University Art Gallery

Artist in his studio constructing components for Exchange, 2015, Poplar Wood |  Photo: Nash Baker

Photographs by Dawn Baxter