Exhibition: Fade: Site responsive Installation - including the venues light, and architectural dynamics in the configuration of the drawings. Performance-these works perform their own demise throughout the duration of the show.

I am proposing to exhibit a suite drawings from my current research.
How can visual perception and understandings of time be manifest in contemporary art? Velocity and traceable detection of alterations in visual phenomena are investigated through evanescent drawings and their digital translations. Perceptual transience - perception of a transaction, perception as transaction. Perception at the point of contact. How does anything become visible or invisible as an image? What are we seeing? What do we think we are seeing? Do we only see what we think we see?

The work I am proposing for time . transcendence . performance is a suite of evanescent drawings, made from gathered light in my studio and including the gathering light from the time . transcendence . performance exhibition. A range of antique black and white photographic paper, with their different colours and rates of change, will directly respond to the light in the exhibition venue.

To see these images is to be implicated in their disappearance. The change is simple to see in comparison to an earlier version, however, without this relative comparison, the perception of this visual shift in time is very difficult to detect. Can the movement of these changing drawings actually be perceived in time?

You can't just look at Benson's evanescent drawings, you have to watch them, like you would a movie, like you would the sky on a day (or night) when time and light are so immense and immersive and intense that the need to hold onto anything just vaporises.
Cassandra Barnett (ATMOS Catalogue)

The instability of these image invites a viewer to come into the now, a now, and to perceive the ever present phenomenological shift and change that we are knowingly or unknowingly involved in.

It is this same light that enables the viewer to see these drawings, that alters and changes these works, a subtle over-writing, leading to the eventual disappearance of any previously visible image or mark. The same light that allows us to see this work is irreversibly altering it. The drawings that are being proposed for time . transcendence . performance will subsume the very light from the symposium, adding the specific light from the duration of the exhibition in October into the list of materials in the work. These works are in a living present, unfixed and still gathering light, and therefore slowly, quietly expiring before our very eyes.

Thus in a sense, to see it, we must miss it. If sensitive to such things we may find ourselves moved, for the work is subtly lifelike “ moving, changing, dying, eluding our grasp. Whatever we see is instantly gone forever, we have no time to get acquainted with the work in its current form, our thought can't keep up with what we are seeing. One way or another, Benson's work has the capacity to throw us out of time, to throw us out of step with ourselves.
Cassandra Barnett