Gross-out collages from visual artist Ben Mendelewicz
Words by Bryony Stone, Monday 10 April 2017
New York-based visual artist Ben Mendelewicz’ work is not easily digested. We featured his “wonderfully loopy” work back in 2015 but since then, things have taken a turn into the realm of dark and twisted fantasy. Ben’s gross out collages sit in the awkward gap between funny and haunting, like memories from an acid trip gone badly wrong. Since graduating with a bachelor of fine arts from New York’s School of Visual Arts in 2013, Ben’s collages, comics and album art has been popping up in exhibitions in the U.S and U.K from Nottingham and Leeds to Austin and New York, for clients from Adult Swim, The New York Times, Funny or Die, Stussy, PopTV, Warner Brothers Records, Matter and in a ever-expanding list of magazines and zines. Among those, Ben has made work for the brilliant Mould Map from Landfill editions.
“I’ve been spending the past few years trying to, as consistently as I can psychologically handle, create work for small press releases and my own small run print publications,” Ben tells us. “Working on a few pieces for shows now and then as well as dividing my my time as one half of a musical duo: Macula Dog.”
As for his shifting psychedelic style, Ben explains “I focus on the content and try to back it into a corner until it squeaks out the way it does. I can probably more accurately describe my style of working as extensive image searches and aggressive Photoshop techniques. Google image search as a thesaurus?”
In line with what you might expect, Ben’s current projects sound both strange and comic, among them “creating some product packaging for some Organic Soothing Wipes to be used on all parts of the body but formulated specifically for ‘sore bottoms’ as well as working on commissioned album artwork” and, more expectedly, “a series of shadow boxes centred around the Mitsubishi Eclipse that will hopefully be complete in time for a show in Toronto next month as well as possibly a video piece for another show focusing on The Grinch.”
“I’ve been spending the past few years trying to, as consistently as I can psychologically handle, create work for small press releases and my own small run print publications,” Ben tells us. “Working on a few pieces for shows now and then as well as dividing my my time as one half of a musical duo: Macula Dog.”
As for his shifting psychedelic style, Ben explains “I focus on the content and try to back it into a corner until it squeaks out the way it does. I can probably more accurately describe my style of working as extensive image searches and aggressive Photoshop techniques. Google image search as a thesaurus?”
In line with what you might expect, Ben’s current projects sound both strange and comic, among them “creating some product packaging for some Organic Soothing Wipes to be used on all parts of the body but formulated specifically for ‘sore bottoms’ as well as working on commissioned album artwork” and, more expectedly, “a series of shadow boxes centred around the Mitsubishi Eclipse that will hopefully be complete in time for a show in Toronto next month as well as possibly a video piece for another show focusing on The Grinch.”
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