NYAB Event - Ben Gocker “Scaredy Cat City”

Ben Gocker “Scaredy Cat City”

P.P.O.W.

This event has ended.

Working with deaccessioned maps and books — taken from dumpsters at the public library where he works — as well as scrap wood, foil, beer cans, and the remnants of old clothes, Gocker has created 10 black and 3 white panel assemblages along with 24 pencil drawings made on the end pages of discarded books. When read together, the works constitute a new approach to narrative and poetic space, establishing a kind of shades-down dream cartography of wherever or whatever Scaredy Cat City is.
Gocker’s palette is dark — blacks abound, smudged fat pencil lines conquer and wander, glue is left to collect dirt and dust — and yet everything about it that could be read as nostalgic or melancholic is undercut by a warm thoughtfulness, the careful deployment and arrangement of pattern, of color, of glassy chocolate wrappers — the build-up of a playful, poetic vocabulary of form and material. The work in Scaredy Cat City is largely affective, evoking deep emotions: feelings felt, lost, forgotten, put-off, recalled. Things here, on the brink of the never been, are returned to us in color and repetition — a kind of insistence on vibrancy and memory.

Ben Gocker was born in Rochester, NY in 1979. He received an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His work was recently exhibited at Wallspace and he performed pieces from, and exhibited work based on, his novella “The Pisces” at Interstate Projects in Brooklyn. He has also given readings at Simone Subal Gallery, James Fuentes, Regina Rex, and the New Museum. His works are in private and public collections. Gocker’s work has been reviewed in Artforum, Art in America, The Village Voice and The New Yorker. He currently lives in Queens, NY and is a librarian at Brooklyn Public Library.