Ben Dowell & Kristen Jensen. Everything Speaks

About

Jensen’s sculptural works create all together new systems: her hand-built ceramic vessels command the soft plinths on which they rest while paradoxically the fabric threatens to subsume the vessels. The linen substrates of Dowell’s paintings are systematically laden with oil paint using one brush, only to have the material quality of the paint upend the geometric nature of the painting with fugitive oil staining. 

Occupying a generational perspective, the artists have an earnest engagement of history and materials. They create within a realm of doubt and embrace the healthy “reversed faith” of skepticism. The resulting objects resonate  with an inarticulate presence that are suspended in a moment of pre language, not destined to become sedentary as facts and understandings.

Dowell and Jensen share a sensitivity of material and a natural propensity for the awkward and overwhelming.  Although formally differing, they use material towards their literal collapse, while simultaneously acknowledging the inescapable ideals of transcendence and expression within the mediums. What results are objects full of contradictions, whose nature serves to expand the interpretations and experience of viewing the work. It's a position that stems from and simultaneously manifests anxiety.