“A Different State,” a group exhibition featuring assemblage, sculpture, painting and performance, opens Friday at Synesthesia gallery in Bushwick. The show brings together three artists — Benjamin Kendall, Brandon English, and James Hopper — exploring themes of empire, authority, territorial reclamation and resistance.
The opening reception runs from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. at 43 Porter Avenue, with free admission. The exhibition continues through May 3.
According to the gallery’s announcement, the exhibition presents art “as a collective confrontation” that turns the gallery “into a space of reciprocal activation.” The artists question empire, influence, and authority while examining “nuances of erasure, transformation, existence, and resistance.”
Benjamin Kendall, a poet and noise maker from Atlanta who lives in Brooklyn, focuses his practice on “reconnecting, rediscovery, and the reclaiming of stolen space, time, and histories.” His work “resists with a radical responsibility and reevaluation of how history is remembered” through sound, disruptions, and language.
Brandon English brings an interdisciplinary approach centered on “counter-surveillance archival practices and how they intersect with vestiges of vernacular image making.” His work explores democratized imaging technologies including cellphones, DSLRs, and surveillance cameras, while examining “various lineages of African American object performance” through instrument building and sound performances.
James Hopper works with portraiture and landscape to address “questions of other/kinship, the radical extension of empathy, and how representation can interrogate the fundamental assumptions that shape our world.”
The exhibition emphasizes audience participation, with the artists stating that “individual art practices mediate our collective experience while audience interactions complete the work.” The show aims to challenge “viewers’ beliefs of fundamental freedoms through remediated shifts in our awareness and becoming.”
Synesthesia is located at 43 Porter Avenue in Bushwick. The gallery describes “A Different State” as both “a cause and consequence” that recreates memory “through what is present, possible, or absent.”
Featured image: Bushwick Daily archive
