It seems, at a certain juncture, easier to be told what to do. In another version of things (life), our choices might feel more like instinct: automatic, unthinking, and unburdened by the albatross of interpretation, like a wild animal who doesn’t have to decide what to make of itself. Baby sea turtles, newborn horses. From the jump, they simply go, as if there had never been another option. But for all our supposed intelligence, it isn’t really like that for us. In this process of becoming, we learn what to do from other people, often without realizing it. And only later does it begin — unevenly and never fully — to feel like our own.

Something like that is happening here, in these paintings. There is space, and with it the suggestion of possibility. The images — silhouettes, really, their contours clearer than whatever they’re supposed to contain — are never sealed in one clean narrative; they sprawl open a range of futures contained in the present. At first, it reads as a kind of freedom, with the sense that anything might happen: choice, on a silver platter. But the longer I look, the more it feels given in advance, already spoken for or written in the stars. A predestined gift. I’m not sure when a gift becomes something you yourself have to carry, or whether that’s what it is from the start. Rarely does it feel free; sooner or later, what is exchanged between us — even the most altruistic of gestures — ends up scored. And it may be that this is how anything comes to matter at all. As Ben said to me, “Codependency is the true cost.”

The silhouettes stack, then restack: purses, a candelabra, a construction hat, countries, teddy bears, heeled shoes, a welding torch, figures that could be men or women or children. A kind of magpie assemblage — though even that implies more coherence than there is — in which things almost line up, or seem to, for a second, before slipping out of relation again. In this room, I keep expecting something to latch onto, a person or feeling I might recognize. It doesn’t. Or not in any way that lasts. After a while it’s just one thing and then another, accumulating without replacing anything. Accretions, perhaps — not quite inside it, not quite outside. Forms with no discernible before or after, as if they had always been there. It begins to feel like something was waiting. Like stepping into a premade role, a contract you never fully entered into but are bound by all the same.

-Text by Keegan Brady

—–

Ben Garbus (b. 1995, Tucson, Arizona) lives and works in New York. He grew up in Massachusetts and holds a BA from Oberlin College. Recent exhibitions include Novel of Circulation at AD.NYC, Gray Ecologies at Adler Beatty in New York,  Kunstindustrie at Seventeen in London and Super Aunt at Carrefour in Montreal.