Benjamin Heiken

Region: Pacific Coast

City / State: Spokane, WA

Due to its fluidity and mixability, wet paint is undefined by mass, shape, or color. As such, it represents a kind of ultimate freedom, while the final dry painting symbolically represents the permanent solidification of an object or image. I am concerned with the allegorical possibility of something that moves from a plastically undetermined state to an existentially fixed position.

Houses, earth, mud, clay, and tears are the architecture of these paintings. Dwelling is a better word than house, since it emphasizes the act of living within a place. To dwell is also to fixate on something, fixate meaning both to freeze or to obsess over.