Artist Statement
Blurring the binaries of pain and pleasure and of private and public, Ezra Benus’ practice utilizes and references formats of collaboration, knowledge from Jewish spirituality, and object explorations from disability cultures and experiences. Creating tangible connections to disability and illness experiences through mundane objects grounds the artwork in a material reality that is not only metaphorical.
Benus is interested in artworks as vectors to explore scenes that are socially/culturally assumed as needing to be kept private and displaying them to elucidate a slippage of the ableist violent logics that pertain to the erasure of illness/disability from society. Objects like magic wand massagers, heating pads, shower chairs, tourniquets, needles, and bedpans feature throughout sculptural work, evoking the underlying erotics and violence in the eugenic-laden medical-industrialized system that is a bedrock of our modern conception of normativity and the body (politic). Benus proposes a visceral, historical, relational, and spiritual enmeshment of illness as a pathway for connection and consideration towards an anti-ableist reckoning.
Biography
Ezra Benus is an artist, educator, and curator raised and based in Brooklyn, whose multi-media practice concerns values of normativity, relationships, and intimacies of power, pain, and pleasure.
They have exhibited at BRIC, Perlman Teaching Museum, NYU Gallatin Gallery, Pratt Manhattan Gallery, Dedalus Foundation, EFA Project Space, The Shed, and internationally with Shape Arts (UK), Museion (IT), MMK Frankfurt (DE), Doris McCarthy Gallery (CA), Art Gallery Windsor (CA), and Migros Museum (CH). Ezra has received support as an Art Matters Foundation Artist2Artist Fellowship, and has had residencies with Art Beyond Sight’s Art + Disability Residency, Wave Hill Winter Workspace, EFA SHIFT Residency, and BRIClab Contemporary Art.
Benus is also one half of Brothers Sick (with Noah Benus), a sibling artistic collaboration steeped in explorations of disability justice, politics, and histories of illness, spirituality, Jewishness, and care. Their work has been featured in publications such as Artforum, Pin Up, Mousse Magazine, Ocula, Art Agenda, Publico ípsilon, and Welt Kunst.
