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P.P.O.W, GALLERY - Ben Gocker

622 views · Published 23 March 2014 · 7:59 · Indexed 22 September 2026

Channel: NYC GALLERY OPENINGS · 2014 · Entertainment

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Ben Gocker
Scaredy Cat City

March 20th - April 19th, 2014
Opening:  March 20th 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM

P·P·O·W is pleased to present Ben Gocker's second solo exhibition of 
assemblages and works on paper at the gallery entitled, Scaredy Cat City. 
Working with deaccessioned maps and books -- taken from dumpsters at 
the public library where he works -- as well as scrap wood, foil, beer cans, 
and the remnants of old clothes, Gocker has created 10 black and 3 white 
panel assemblages along with 24 pencil drawings made on the end pages of 
discarded books. When read together, the works constitute a new approach 
to narrative and poetic space, establishing a kind of shades-down dream 
cartography of wherever or whatever Scaredy Cat City is.

Gocker's palette is dark -- blacks abound, smudged fat pencil lines conquer 
and wander, glue is left to collect dirt and dust -- and yet everything about it 
that could be read as nostalgic or melancholic is undercut by a warm 
thoughtfulness, the careful deployment and arrangement of pattern, of color, 
of glassy chocolate wrappers -- the build-up of a playful, poetic vocabulary 
of form and material. The work in Scaredy Cat City is largely affective, 
evoking deep emotions: feelings felt, lost, forgotten, put-off, recalled. Things 
here, on the brink of the never been, are returned to us in color and 
repetition -- a kind of insistence on vibrancy and memory.

Upon entering the gallery, 10 black panels all shaped like rudimentary 
houses warily balanced on inadequate stilts surround the perimeter of the 
room. In each, laid atop the wrinkled, folded ground of painted over and 
obfuscated maps, are views of parti-colored scaffolds, skeletal derricks, and 
the lotus like ziggurats of some imagined world inhabited by, and composed 
of: blue peanuts, carpet remnants, chipped crayons, and scrap wood 
cannibalized from past installations and sculptures or scavenged from the 
street. Gocker begins each piece by nailing a fragment of gold foil -- a kind 
of centering, and planetary referent -- to the upper left hand corner of the 
panel then laying out wooden "lines", or "stages", from which he builds up 
his vocabulary of simple patterns: orange triangles, gingerly balanced scales, 
green "staircases", a scrap of wall-to-wall, wooden dials, a peanut on a pike. 
Though seemingly familiar, these aggregate forms and patterns function 
more like nonce words, teetering between sense and nonsense, the realized 
and the incomplete, the familiar and the strange.

Within the second room of the exhibition Gocker presents a suite of 24 
drawings of interiors on pulpy, yellowed end pages taken from discarded 
library books. Each drawing shares the same title, See You in the Morning, 
and is framed with one of six colors. The drawings, done in thick pencil, 
suggests the setting and striking of the same set over and over: a bedroom, 
sparsely furnished except for pillows and blankets, a window either open or 
closed, a door either open or shut, a plant, shadows, a nightstand, the floor.

If Scaredy Cat City is a place, the three framed assemblages in the third 
gallery, each titled It's Just Another Room, are where the visitors stay. Glued 
down rags and the scraps of old clothes frame the tiered abodes of the 
figures Gocker has glued, wired, and nailed together from old toothpaste 
tubes, Bitburger cans, kitchen sponges, and other anonymous household 
detritus. Childish conceptions of the living and dead are confused and 
redirected: 'shades' made of old work shirts and bric-a-brac scrap move 
among and replace the foilheaded beings at the tops of these ad hoc 
hierarchies. And the photograph of a friend, ten years younger than the 
artist, sits somewhere among these fragments covered by a piece of paper... 
Age catches up, it seems to say and not say, the scraps become us, we go 
on.

Ben Gocker was born in Rochester, NY in 1979. He received an MFA in poetry 
from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. His work was recently 
exhibited at Wallspace and he performed pieces from, and exhibited work 
based on, his novella "The Pisces" at Interstate Projects in Brooklyn. He has 
also given readings at Simone Subal Gallery, James Fuentes, Regina Rex, and 
the New Museum. His works are in private and public collections. Gocker's 
work has been reviewed in Artforum, Art in America, The Village Voice and 
The New Yorker. He currently lives in Queens, NY and is a librarian at 
Brooklyn Public Library.


Music by:
Chill Carrier - A New Day

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