Ben Tong
certain technicalities of being
Curated by Páll Haukur Björnsson
Kling & Bang, Reykjavík, Iceland, June 3 - July 7, 2023
Born in 1981 in Toronto, Canada, and now based in Los Angeles, artist Ben Tong has worked with an array of media, from video to installation, and painting. His oil paintings on canvas move beyond traditional representation, mining the fertile ground between a moment and its later re-remembrance. The objects in the compositions, in sumptuous colors ranging from deep violets to apricot, feel like approximations drawn from a dream-like state. Tong often foregoes a brush in favor of rags and a massage gun, bruising the color onto the painting’s surface, sometimes rendering dappled semblances of a still-life. Here, Tong freezes memory on the brink of vanishing and edges closer to a monument of the in-betweens of daily life.