Solo Show
Perimeter Gallery, Chicago
Feb 10 – March 10, 2012
Revolution – special installation
Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA
Oct 2012
Essay by J. Susan Isaacs, Ph.D.
Curator, Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts
MAY 25, 2007
GALLERY GLANCE
Ben Whitehouse is a respected landscape painter known for his subtle and subdued portrayals of Midwestern landscapes, his sensitivity to which is even more notable for his not being a native but a transplanted Englishman. Thus, his video work may seem oddly cool and out of sync with his mostly traditional paintings.
Closer examination reveals that his adoption of a video camera in exchange for a paintbrush is simply an expansion of Whitehouse’s fascination with landscape, allowing him to keep his eye on one view over time and to present this view in real time to us.
Various videos include wind in bare trees, a daylong view of a serene lake and a 24-hour record of one day in Central Park. These videos challenge us to see the world around us through the abstracted eye of the artist, tricking us into a kind of mediation. We see changing light and the movement of small parts of the whole. By focusing on a single scene, we pass through novelty and then through boredom until we reach a state where we become entranced by the world’s infinite complexity.
Ben Whitehouse, Alfedena Gallery, 434 W. Ontario; (312) 944-4340. Through June 2.