Demarcations brings together two discrete bodies of work made within the last year. The exhibition is influenced by the relations and projections that we build between ourselves and the Other. The pictorial grounds within the exhibition have a perpetually disturbed rapport with their figures. These landscapes shift around perspectival axes that chart disoriented viewpoints, boundaries, and proximities.

Untitled (Saint Francis of Assisi Receiving the Stigmata) is a video installation that disassembles Giotto Di Bondone’s painting of the same name (1295-1300), and restages the composition into a fiction. The figures of Christ and Saint Francis have been removed from the landscape, negotiating a separation between figure and ground. The perspective circles the projection of stigmata, articulated as abstracted lines of transference, demarcating the tension between two absent bodies.

A new drawing from the series Demarcations details a simplified architectural blueprint that overlaps and contaminates each previous rendition of the motif every time it is redrawn. The work occupies a threshold between constructed and improvised, using the rigid structure of the grid to speak plainly to a complex, weave-like network of interactions.

Benjamin Bannan (b.1997, Boorloo/Perth) is an artist living and working on unceded Wurundjeri/Woiwurrung and Boon Wurrung/Bunurong lands. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Curtin University (2018) and a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) from Monash University (2020), where he is currently a Master of Fine Art candidate. Bannan participated in the 2019 Festival Lab facilitated by Perth Festival, and was a recipient of the Lowensteins Arts Management Award in 2020. He presented his first solo exhibition Untitled (Saint Francis of Assisi Receiving the Stigmata) at West Space, VIC 2021. Group exhibitions include Landscape in a Convex Mirror as part of the Art Encounters Biennial, Timișoara, Romania, 2021 (forthcoming); Here&Now20: Perfectly Queer, Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, WA 2020; ARCUS, Martin Browne Contemporary, NSW 2020; Continuity and Change; Future, Mundaring Arts Centre, WA 2019; HATCHED: National Graduate Exhibition, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, WA 2018.