April 2 - May 8, 2010
MIRROR, MIRROR - a show of portraits
GUY BEN-NER - Second Nature
Mirror, Mirror
The portrait has been a staple of art going back to the Egyptians and the sculptural bust of Nefertiti. Then 3300
or so years later came Andy and Alice and Chuck and Cindy and Annie. What's next? The mind wanders and
wonders about something new and relevant to the present moment that the genre can deliver. "Mirror, Mirror"
is a group exhibition of nine artists engaged with contemporary portraiture in all media. The works in the show
present a variety of approaches from realistic, exquisitely rendered paintings of the artist's friends (Jenny
Morgan) and traditional portraits of the members of American Communist Party (Yevgeniy Fiks) to bitingly
satirical drawings (William Powhida), unsettling video self portraits (Kate Gilmore), photographs of three
generations of artist's family in the rural Midwest (Chris Verene), video reenactments of people on Facebook
who share the same name (Ursula Endlicher), portraits painted directly on top of the people they represent and
then photographed to look like a painting (Alexa Meade), and metaphysical psychedelic portraits of people's
souls (Jason Robert Bell). Tamas Banovich, will contribute a work involving Chatroulette.
GUY BEN-NER Second Nature Employing animals, animal trainers and an on-camera film crew all speaking in rhyme Second Nature restages Aesop's fable The "Fox and the Crow" combined with Beckett's "Waiting for Godot".
Can you tell a fable today? Is it not too arrogant to believe you can educate someone? On the other hand, if I
believed art could not deliver any kind of lesson or critique of the world, I would stop making it. Guy Ben-Ner
In Second Nature Ben-Ner has created a video that emerges from Aesop's fable "The Fox and the Crow". It is a
video in three parts that blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction'. One part of the video is shot as a
documentary about specialist animal trainers training a fox and a crow to re-enact the fable, but develops into
a fictional re-telling of the fable itself by the animals, interjected with a re-enactment of Samuel Beckett's
"Waiting for Godot" by the animal trainers. The dialogue between human and animal is crucial, exploring subtle
modifications in behaviour made through the interaction between the two, where one can never truly control
the other. GUY BEN-NER
Second Nature, 2008
Postmasters Gallery, located in Chelsea 459 West 19th Street
(corner of 10th Avenue), is open Tuesday through Saturday to 11 - 6 pm.
Please contact Magdalena Sawon at 212-727-3323 with any questions
or image requests.
In the repetitive and questionably futile action of trainee and trainer, Ben-Ner's video owes much to the plays of
Beckett - the trainer trains the animals to re-enact the fable; Ben-Ner trains the trainer to act In the
documentary and the play; and the animals train each other within the tale itself. He uses the same setting, a
lonely tree, to tell two different stories - one a fable and one a play. Ben-Ner reveals the function of fables - the
use of animals to tell human stories and instruct our own moral behaviour - and mimics their strategies to
manipulate the animal trainers as the fable unfolds. Essentially the action is the same, repeated again and
again. Kyla McDonald - catalog for the Liverpool Biennial, 2008
Single channel video, color with sound,10:10 min
Animals Supplied by: Birds and Aminals UK
Fox Trainer: Guillaume Grange
Crow Trainer: Gwen Griffith
Fox: Bambi and Briar
Crow: Oreo and Nabisco
Film Production: Roger Appleton
Sound Recording: Alan Watson
Editing Facillities: CCA, Tel Aviv
Commissioned by Liverpool Biennial International 08