Ben Godward‘s madness of an art studio is the exact antithesis of Jason Andrew’s spotless apartment gallery, Norte Maar. When visiting him in September of 2012, he told me about being a kid in the midwest and going to all-night coffee shops. There, he and his friends would get hopped up on coffee and buy jelly doughnuts. They’d take the doughnuts to Kinko’s and smear them across the copy machine’s glass to match the speed of the machine’s light. Upon paying for the copies the late night clerk would give them a sly smile – aware of the hijinks they’d wrought and the clean up ahead of him.
That clerk’s intuition for letting these kids play with color has panned out to be a wise one. If only because Ben has followed this direction into the three-dimensional realm with his fantastical sculptures. Sculptures that have dotted the landscape outside Norte Maar in Beat Nite’s and BOS’s past. Recently, he’s revisited the photocopy work by publishing with Fortress To Solitude. These series of events led ultimately to the exhibition Play at Norte Maar.
