JDJ is thrilled to participate in The Armory Show with a solo presentation of recent works by Myles Bennett.

Using the grain of the canvas as his guide, Myles Bennett explores its material capabilities in innovative ways. The resulting works, which incorporate ink, acrylic, graphite and colored pencil, blur the divisions between painting, drawing, textile, and sculpture, and embody a sense of space both within and beyond the two dimensional plane.

In many of the works on view, Bennett applies ink to both sides of raw canvas to achieve colorful gradients—some subtle, others quite bold, depending on whether he has inked it on the recto or verso. He then uses a small blade to remove the warp—the vertical threads of the canvas—with exacting precision, leaving only the finest threads intact.

The deconstructed sections of the paintings reveal so much more than just the underside of the paintings’ surfaces. Through the process of the removal of the individual threads of canvas, one can notice how the intact threads that remain are painted with two different colors, and how the subtle twist of the strands can reveal both colors simultaneously.

Bennett’s constructive and deconstructive process allows him to play with the relationships between support, surface, transparency and opacity, as bands of color interact with one another. Some of the spliced canvases take on more of a sculptural, draped form, hanging from the wall or the ceiling.

Bennett’s interventions to the structure of the canvas create a unique optical and perceptual experience, and call to mind a number of artistic movements— from the Spatialism of Lucio Fontana, to the Supports/Surfaces artists working in France in the 1960s, to the Light and Space movement in California, who were interested in how geometry and light can affect the perception of the viewer.

Myles Bennett (b. 1983 Nashville, TN) is a Brooklyn-based artist working in painting, drawing, and sculpture. A graduate in architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design (‘06), his focus on the personal scale of construction and materiality has evolved into an exploration of the intersection between gesture and the inherent properties of surface. Myles has exhibited widely, showing his work most recently at JDJ (New York), Rutger Brandt (Amsterdam), Pamela Walsh (Palo Alto), Dimmitt Contemporary (Houston/Austin), Lafontsee Gallery (Grand Rapids), and Espositivo (Madrid).