Urban Fractures by Ben Howe

Saturday the 2nd of August, 4 pm at 5/502 King Street, Newtown, Sydney

5-502 Is a new art space on King street in Sydney's Newtown, opening its doors periodically to provide a non profit platform for innovative contemporary art. By transforming this residential warehouse into a hybrid show room, we intend to open up the private space in the community instead of contributing to the escalating trend of community segregation.

To celebrate the birthday of this space, we will be showing the urban paintings of Melbourne based artist Ben Howe, whose works form an allegory between the phenomenon of gentrification and the importance of increasingly marginalized cultural spaces.

Self organisation is one knot in the concept of this exhibition; a concept supported by and reflected in the establishment of 5-502 itself.

Howe created these works while living in Hamburg, where he refined a critical vision of the modern city in relation to his experience as a recent migrant. He has made paintings of buildings which have a history of counter culture and change:

“Their facades are crumbling, accumulating coats of history with layer upon layer of graffiti, dust and event posters in the face of new, antiseptic apartments, offices and shops.”

Exploring a number of techniques to reflect this subject, Howe layers and peels away strips of paper, utilizes stencils to mirror the street art witch covers the walls, and plays with the idea of working “free form blackout” over carefully planned colour maps.

The issue of reproducing the words and pictures of other people is also confronted, as the countless scrawls and icons that crowd every available surface are inseparable from the living history of the spaces.

These are interpreted and translated into meaningless impressions: an unreadable language of lines and shapes through which meaning can almost, but not quite, be derived.

All this combines to evoke a gritty sense of reality in the works, which are intimately tied to time, community and place.