membership / artist member

Ben Long

http://www.benlong.co.uk
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Ben Long was commissioned by the Contemporary Art Society for The Economist Plaza exhibition programme in 2009.

Ben Long’s practice focuses on British culture and operates predominantly within the public realm to enable diverse audiences to engage with his work.

This ethos of shared experience and inclusivity is clearly demonstrated in The Great Travelling Art Exhibition, an on-going series of drawings made onto the rear shutters of haulage trucks. Using his finger to scribe into the layer of dirt built up from the vehicles' exhaust emissions, Long creates the drawings, often travelling with the truck drivers to photograph the artworks in transit. Lasting a finite period, sometimes up to six months, it is precisely this impermanence, vulnerability and unpredictability that give the drawings their point of interest and contemporary relevance.

In Scaffolding Sculptures, Long constructs large-scale public sculptures using conventional scaffolding components. Inspired by the experience of working on building sites as a teenager, his approach to the project asserts both the value of a disciplined working practice and the playful conception of ideas. By comparing work of an artistic nature with the hard graft of manual employment, he attempts to democratise the process of creative production.

The recently conceived Brass Bandstand project is an ambitious, life-sized reconstruction of a Victorian bandstand, the structure of which is made entirely from highly burnished brass. The proposal for a full-size, fully operational brass bandstand is a gesture that attempts to memorialise, revive and re-animate this familiar structure to its former working glory.

Poubelle de Jour sees the iconic K6 phone box subjected to an exaggerated degradation and deterioration: hundreds of thousands of prostitute calling cards fill the red booth, each displaying mobile phone numbers, their graphic and explicit images jostling to attract attention. In order to create this fetishistic artwork, Long spent two years collecting the large volume of colourful cards from London phone booths. By accumulating his collection in one kiosk, the romanticised K6 becomes phallic and libidinally charged, an absurd object no longer able to accommodate its original function. The encapsulated ephemera offers a comprehensive survey of the professional sex industry, demonstrating the growth in demand for one service in contrast with the decline for another.

• Horse Scaffolding Sculpture

  1st May — 26th June 2009
  The Economist Plaza 25 St. James's Street, London SW1A 1HG