Ben Galaday

bio

Ben Galaday is an artist and educator working in NYC. Their recent body of work “INFINITE WRENCH” is concerned with issues of desire, denial, and delusion, systems set up to fail, manipulate or bewitch, and the residue of information hidden just beyond the edges of awareness, be it biological, cosmological, or mystical. Galaday holds an MFA in Sculpture from University of South Florida and a BFA in Ceramics from Oregon College of Art and Craft.

artist statement

Framed by culturally determined and commodified myths whose artifacts are left embedded in the fiber. Boil it down, distill it to the point of fracture, nonsense, then allow it to grow back, bent and rearranged, with awareness along the fault lines. A fresh batch of extraneous particularities clinging to the roots.

I’m interested in cartooning the fundamental, to create imposters, preposterous symbols of cherished and repulsive drives. To examine and provoke the profound shared sublime through clumsy artifice and campy artificiality.

Shimmering in the precarious state between seductive and demoralized, familiar and foreign, my work addresses the idiosyncratic mechanisms of cognition with the anxiety of an existential hypochondriac. I make alluring objects with ulterior motives; deceptively poppy and fizzy with an underlying alienation and perverse self-awareness.