Art News

New works on paper and installations composed of stained glass by Ben Durham opens at Country Club

CHICAGO, IL.- Country Club presents the second exhibit for its Chicago program with Found Graffiti, featuring new works on paper and installations composed of stained glass by Ben Durham. Found Graffiti is presented in collaboration with Andrew Rafacz Gallery. In these two recent bodies of work, graffiti functions as an unofficial language that speaks directly of the people and the places where it was sprayed, scratched, or marked. It is a signature, an identity rendered as logo, and a dispossessed claim, not just of self, but of territory. It is a kind of real-time mapmaking akin to psychogeography in its frustrated attempt to achieve personal, spatial, and cultural orientation. In the Graffiti Map body of work, Durham has collected found graffiti imagery and transcribed them with graphite and ink onto the handmade paper surface. Layered to the point of nearly complete visual