PRESS RELEASE

Brad Benischek's Ghost City:

​At this very moment Brad Benischek is drawing with graphite on Cathouse FUNeral’s sumptuous plaster walls, setting the scene for his three giant “Territorial Trophy” denim jackets, one of which was on display at Salon Zürcher this past art fair week.  Giotto, Diego Rivera and Keith Haring come to mind as his mural quickly and deftly takes shape.  A narrative unfolds of a family beset by danger in an anarchic landscape reminiscent of post-Katrina New Orleans, Benischek’s home.  The time is called The Great Worry, it is 2276 A.D. on one wall, 2369 on another. We follow the family narrative through written notes: "Dear Silas, due to the Great Worry you have to quit school and go out and kill people. Mom - p.s. Sorry," and large scale works on paper that take us out of the primarily domestic space drawn on the gallery walls into a persistently nocturnal landscape populated by threatening creatures like “Dobies” (part human, part dog, xenophobic outsiders whose urine acts as a developer for solargraphic images of dead animals), "Malentines" (bat-like creatures that use infrared light to parasitically re-direct their reproductive seed by means of cross-specie orgies) and "Pooka" (blood thirsty rabbits with weapons) which are menacing everywhere.  Hollywood scenic painting techniques are being employed, the scale is epic quotidian struggle in the space of Social Breakdown colored with familial love.

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Brad Benischek is an artist based in New Orleans, Louisiana where he is co-founder of Press Street, a visual and literary art collective with whom he developed the annual 24-hour Draw-A-Thon.  During 'Ghost City' Brad will produce a limited edition series of silk-screen prints thanks to a residency with the Italian collective Print About Me (more information to follow).  He has shown at 1646 in The Hague, Netherlands; Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans; Acadiana Center for the Arts, Lafayette, LA; and Cathouse FUNeral in our inaugural exhibition; among others.