Neil Bender
The aim of the work is to seduce and give pleasure through imagery that is social and accessible. To suspend the viewer's interaction with the work, I deploy "hooks" such as graphic imagery and lurid color to create an overflowing, lascivious world of flowering, fluid fragments that are theatrical and explore many possible genders and sexual situations. Pink is used as a color of identification, which is descriptive of all of our internal bodies. Its feminine connotations are embraced and simultaneously upended to create aggressive images. Installation has become a method to create stages for the many characters of my practice; small theatres within larger theatres.
Since a typically-American adolescence of pop residue (such as baseball, pro wrestling, He-Man, hip-hop and shopping malls) in urban New Jersey, I have looked to image-making as a way of negotiating biological drives and urges with culture's beautifully decorative facades, social norms, and stilted morality. Most of our humor revolves around the obscene; my work aims to use humor as a start to open up other far-reaching and probing investigations. Without having rigid expectations from the viewer, I hope they can use my objects for the alleviation of anxiety and the eradication of desire to reach a welcoming space where every fantasy and fetish is potentially fulfilled.
![](https://nap-master.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/styles/entry_thumb/public/bubblybubblegum.jpg?_gM8adh8H90nvDxSQ3jKbCCjwYHoydzs&itok=fDmuZUnP)
![](https://nap-master.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/styles/entry_thumb/public/Hole.jpg?wOaUCpWLPneGzgHTDS5.NVuAJ0xL1amg&itok=ZD9w2DaC)
![](https://nap-master.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/styles/bio_cover_img/public/bender.jpg?p8FFNI4Obyx3fj7vQHgIk_uJ6zka0b_7&itok=oMIxy5BT)