Scholar’s Rock with Rounds, 2013
Ben Butler is a sculptor and public artist working in Memphis, Tennessee, and Quoque, New York.
In addition to showing his work extensively in gallery and museum exhibitions, he has produced commissioned sculptures, murals, and installations in a range of media for hotels, hospitals, parks, and other public spaces nationally, including the Hyatt Regency Chicago and the Crosstown Arts Theater in Memphis.
Butler received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and his BA from Bowdoin College. He is the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Individual Artist Grant and numerous fellowships at residency programs including the MacDowell Colony, The Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, and the Ucross Foundation. He currently shows at John Davis Gallery in Hudson, New York.
My sculptures reflect the sensibility that objects are not fixed and finite, but are the product or residue of ongoing processes. They provide evidence of unseen forces, and they point to the distinction between the human and the non-human. Throughout the natural world, unexpected complexity emerges from simple, persistent processes. When the order of things is not readily apparent, complexity is often mistaken for chaos. In the rush to comprehend we often miss the wonderful unseen forces at work. My response is to play in these boundaries between the simple and the complex, and between the complex and the overwhelming.