Home | Benjamin Rasmussen

March 1, 2013

Opening: March 1st, from 6-9pm

Exhibition Dates: March 1 – April 12

Artist Statement

I grew up in the Philippines, on the small island of Balabac, with an American mother and a father from the Faroe Islands, a small Danish protectorate in the North Atlantic. As an adult, I moved to the United States and married a woman from rural Wyoming.

Belonging to three groups so geographically, culturally and linguistically separated from one another, I exist in a middle place between them. I am both separated from truly being a part of these societies, while also functioning as a conduit between them.

“Home” has grown out a desire for my different worlds to interact with and know each other. This work is meant for them.

But this raises the question of how does one make photographs that connect people to each other? How do you embrace the spirit of a place without exoticising its inhabitants into the status of the “other”?

Susan Sontag wrote, “The lure of photographs, their hold on us, is that they offer at one and the same time a connoisseur’s relation to the world and a promiscuous acceptance of the world.” My goal is to share this “promiscuous acceptance” with the viewer and through that, share the common value that each place holds for me. The desire is to have an aesthetic and humanistic meeting place, even if there cannot be a cultural or linguistic one.

My approach has been less a part of the documentary or photojournalistic tradition then an ode to the picture postcard. The images printed here are romanticized portrayals of what is alien to an outsider and mundane to a resident. And through the shuffling of images, the aim is to give viewers a chance to experience both the known and the foreign simultaneously. This makes the strange more recognizable while simultaneously injecting life back into the familiar.

-Benjamin Rasmussen