In &Milk, recent Guggenheim Fellow, Ben Thorp Brown presents new work in sculpture, photography, and his 2019 video, Cura, filmed in the Neutra VDL House II on the Silver Lake Reservoir. Produced with support from the Jeu de Paume, Paris; CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux; and Museo Amparo, Puebla; and Creative Capital, the work has an extensive exhibition history, but this will be the Los Angeles debut and Brown’s first exhibition in Los Angeles. Alongside the film, Brown has produced a series of recent sculptures and photographs in response to Cura’s Garden, an immersive, living installation that Brown opened at KunsthalGent in Belgium in May 2023. Like the film, the installation and resulting works draw on themes of care and creation, empathy, and design for emotional effect.
In Cura, Brown brings to life principles developed by the Austrian American architect Richard Neutra, who saw architecture as a therapeutic tool and designed projects in which each environmental element was carefully calculated to elicit sensory and emotional responses. Intrigued by Neutra’s aspirations to create architecture that was designed with empathy for the inhabitants, and the way that ideal contrasts with some of the homogenizing, developmentalist, and “rational” impulses of the modernist project, Brown focuses his camera’s eye on a regal and ancient-seeming tortoise, who moves slowly and purposefully through this iconic space, singing in the voice of Cura. (Performed by Joan La Barbara, and Ethan Philbrick on the cello.)
In Roman mythology, Cura created a human by shaping a lump of clay and asking Jove to supply this earthly body with a spirit. When they quarreled over whose name this new being should carry, Cura or Jove, Saturn intervened and named it Homo (after Humo, the earth that formed the body.) Cura was charged with the responsibility of caring for humans while they lived on earth, and Jove with responsibility for their spirits after death. Cura’s creative impulse is immediately interwoven with the responsibility to care for her creation - A responsibility analogous to both parenthood and art-making. This creation myth, which places the caretaker at the center, also aligns with a key tension of domestic architecture. Once the house is built, it comes to life and is made home by its inhabitants, whose paths and preferences re-shape the space over time. Philbrick’s cello also cues the informed viewer to the subtle presence of Neutra’s wife, Dione, who practiced her instrument in the family home, and who cited her husband’s respect and support of her own creative pursuits as a cornerstone of their happy marriage.
In 2023, Brown was invited to create an “Endless Exhibition” for Kunsthal Gent - the installation is a permanent garden in the building’s courtyard that includes a carefully curated selection of trees, a handmade ceramic fountain that references Cura’s creation of the human body from clay, and subtle adjustments to the atmosphere in the form of a “fog sculpture” titled Embrace. The garden was planned to suggest a vision of Arcadia and to create a space that would provoke feelings of both wonder and unease. The fog is often dense, obscuring visitors’ vision and creating dynamic and shifting conditions to experience the garden and other people exploring the space. Alongside the film, Brown is exhibiting a series of new photographs documenting the ever-changing conditions of the garden and a pair of ceramic sculptures made by draping slabs of clay over the body. The resulting forms are organic and somewhat abstract - Suggesting the limits of where a figure emerges and dissipates, and how dynamic, even political the conditions of bringing something into existence can be.
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Ben Thorp Brown (b. 1983, USA, lives and works in New York) attended Williams College, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program. His work in sculpture, video, sound, and installation is developed in dialogue with specific architectural sites and landscapes, which become settings for expansive worlds that unfold over time. In his work, experiments in perception disorient and also create playful forms of connection, suggestive of the dynamic conditions of collectivity itself. Museum exhibitions include The MAK (Vienna, Austria); The Whitney Museum (New York, NY); MoMA PS1 (Queens, NY); SculptureCenter (Queens, NY); Kunsthal Gent (Ghent, Belgium); Jeu de Paume (Paris, France); CAPC Bordeaux (Bordeaux, France); Museo Amparo (Puebla, Mexico); St. Louis Art Museum (St. Louis, MO), and the Istanbul Biennial (Istanbul, Turkey). He has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, Creative Capital, the Graham Foundation, the Shifting Foundation, and was an artist in residence at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. He teaches in the fine arts department of Parsons School of Design, The New School.