Townworld

Amanita is excited to present Townworld, Ben Werther’s latest exhibition- a new body of work that crafts an American mythology through painting and collage.

Ben Werther (b. 1998, Nashville, Tennessee) is an American artist known for his exploration of found objects and their relationship to broader historical narratives.

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Townworld, USA - A New American Myth

Townworld exists in keeping with the mythological trope of lost worlds and hollow earths as a kind of gas-station-Atlantis alongside a forgotten stretch of highway somewhere in America. In constructing Townworld and its local mythos, Ben Werther spent years collecting early-2000s high school yearbooks from antique stores, thrift stores, and yard sales in his hometown of Nashville, Tennessee. In Townworld, images sourced from these yearbooks are combined with scans taken of model train catalogues featuring miniature, detailed environments in order to paint a familiar yet unplaceable American heartland. The artist's subjects, people he could have known, are transplanted into an anonymous miniature suburbia, creating a landscape that resonates with those who have a mental image of what constitutes small-town America.

Like in his previous work, process is integral to Werther’s exhibition. He meticulously selects and magnifies found images, adheres them to canvas, and adorns them with smeared monotypes. His paint rolled streaks are meant to conjure buffed out graffiti or white-out textbooks. Appealing to our love of things vintage and analog, low-res and provisional, Werther fabricates a false sense of history by eroding the surface of the painting, recalling the distressed leather jacket or an old tree carved into with lovers' initials.

Drawing from his experience growing up in Tennessee, Werther compiles his source materials to take agency over what gives a place its regional identity. Sports mascots and science experiments are treated as raw material. The artist draws attention to the strange tradition of dressing up as an animal at a homecoming game and the act of making a paper mache volcano in science class. Understandably, we take for granted these American traditions. Some of the crafts and costumes in the images might seem surreal and fantastical when taken out of context. When presented alongside the models, they become meta-historical depictions of Werther’s own actualized crafted landscapes. The miniatures are essential to the narratives that he creates, both as images of craft objects and as strip mall architecture whose fiction contends with the historical events they are paired with.

The American aesthetic in Townworld is composed of vinyl-sided, single-family homes and hillside foliage. The conceptual landscape is fixated on holidays and regional crafts, which appeal to a cultural fascination with nostalgic images. The aesthetic of nostalgia can be manufactured through analog processes such as collage and finger-painting. The action of craft depicted by students in the images merges with Ben’s own gestures, pointing out the relationship between the artist and his work. Ben identifies with the characters in his story. He is “theme-parking” his own experiences, taking American stereotypes to their relatable extremes. The viewer is left to reconcile stereotype with Werther’s original myth. Mixing cliché with its own imaginary nature, identity, and national mythology, Townworld manages to both subvert and incorporate reductionist media trends. Through the process of making the work, Ben simultaneously contributes to American myth and asserts agency over said myth.

– Lauryn-Ashley Vandyke