A special pop-up photographic exhibition by Bennett Shipman

Artist's Statement

I think it would be easier had I been a landscape painter. It would have also been easier if I was any good at baseball or any group sport rather; instead I make work about the experience of sitting in pews, and about gay sex, not gratuitously of course, but as an exploration of the sacred and the profane - and as a gay male growing up in the Church of Christ in a provincial town in North Carolina, and how I may fit into that equation. This work specifically is part of a larger body of work that consists of both video and sculpture exploring the idea of erasure and the abstract idea of internal homelessness in regards to identity, or in this case, lack there of.

Bennett is a recent graduate of The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts with both a Certificate and Bachelors in painting. He is the recipient of the William Emlen Cresson Memorial Travel scholarship, as well as The Benjamin West Prize for painting. Bennett, a North Carolina native, lives and works in Philadelphia.