Benton C Bainbridge - 2025 Fall MFACA Exhibition
Benton C Bainbridge (as "Awespell"): Lotus, 2025
Video sculpture (3 channels of digital media; found TVs, wood and glass objects; media players & accessories)
44" wide x 28" deep x 74" high
Courtesy of FEED Media Art Center
The lotus symbolizes rebirth because it grows in impure waters but emerges pure. Lotus —the video sculpture—springs from a cracked flatscreen, rising above a salvaged wooden box. Machine learning tools animate a photograph of Awespell, seen floating in lotus position above the California coast. Awespell is beatified with entrancing light drawings which evoke auras. These spiralling emanations were drawn by video synthesis on customized antique game consoles; the Lissajous motifs were formed by oscillating voltages generated by patch-programmable analog systems of Bainbridge's design. Awespell's hands hold more swirling, calligraphic patterns and are pictured on two tube TVs that rest on glass atop the wood box. The cabling that drives the audiovisuals sprouts from electronics buried in a found ashtray. The space-age wood ‘starburst’ decoration evokes an Oscar Wilde quote: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
