November 14, 2017 - January 8, 2018
In his series “Turning,” Ben Weathers depicts the changes of a banana’s peel in a series of twenty-eight paintings. In his search for poetic beauty in his surroundings, he committed himself to observing the same section of a banana for twenty-eight days, documenting the peel’s changing hues and patterns. Each painting, made of successive layers of thick acrylic paint, mimics the peel of the banana and invites us to question and contemplate our relationship with ordinary objects.
As Weathers observed the ripening banana, he thought it was funny and strange how bananas sort of have a life of their own - and it’s actually a complicated life. As Weathers painted he began peeling back the cultural, historical, and even slap-stick layers of a banana. His attentiveness and insights reflected in “Turning” welcome us to see profundity in the ordinary. The life of the banana documented reminds us of our own trajectory, the physical finiteness we share with all living things.
Photos by Brittany Buongiorno
About the Artist:
Ben Weathers currently lives and works in Jersey City, NJ where is he is a Master of Fine Arts graduate from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. In 2014 he earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in Painting from the Cleveland Institute of Art. In the spring of 2015 he was invited to The Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts, Saratoga, WY for a month-long residency. He was recently in a two-person show, BLAH BLAH BLAH, with Jamey Hart at Forum Artspace in Cleveland, OH (2015) and was part of a curatorial project with Joshua Aruajo that led to the exhibition “Timbre” at Mason Gross School of Arts (2016). In January 2017, Weathers exhibited his thesis project, “Turning” in the Rutgers MFA Show: “Action at a Distance.”