Arts Center’s New Exhibit Features “Art of Healing”
Observer Reports
An object declared broken has already begun its second life.
It may be a discarded fragment, a worn surface, a damaged piece of material that has survived its usefulness in one form and waits, unnoticed, for another. For Patti Benjamin, a self-taught local artist whose work opens at the Atrium Gallery on Friday, such things are not endings, they are materials.
Benjamin’s exhibition will open with a free public reception Friday from 6:30-8:30 p.m. and remain on view through Oct. 9. The show brings together handmade work shaped by texture, dimension and experimentation across a range of mediums.
“I create from my heart,” Benjamin wrote in her artist statement. “My Art is part of my healing.”
The phrase offers a useful key to the work. Benjamin does not describe her art as a polished answer or a fixed destination. She describes it as exploration: a process of working with materials, following an idea and waiting to see what happens next.
“I like dimension and texture,” she wrote. “I enjoy experimenting with many different mediums. I explore just to see what happens. My Creations are fleeting, whimsical & ephemeral.”
Her work appears to resist the notion that art must begin with untouched supplies or end in permanence. Benjamin is drawn instead to cast-off and damaged objects, the things that may have lost their original function but have not exhausted their possibilities.
“I enjoy reviving and refurbishing cast off or broken things and creating something beautiful from the brokenness,” Benjamin wrote.
The process is both physical and emotional as texture records contact, layers suggest time, a repaired or altered object carries evidence of what it was before, even after it becomes something else. In Benjamin’s work, brokenness is not erased. It becomes part of the design.
All the pieces in the exhibition are made by hand, an insistence that matters in a world of quick reproduction and immaculate digital surfaces. The work retains the marks of a person shaping materials slowly, with attention and an openness to surprise.
Benjamin sees creativity as communal. Alongside her own artistic practice, she encourages fellow creatives to pursue their own forms of expression. The exhibition, then, is not only an invitation to view what she has made, but an argument for making something oneself — especially from the things that seem, at first, beyond repair.
The reception and exhibition are free and open to the public.
