Foskers & Egg Whites

Ben Gocker

Foskers & Egg Whites

September 12 – October 12, 2019

Opening Reception: September 12, 6-8 PM

PPOW is pleased to present Foskers & Egg Whites, Ben Gocker’s third solo exhibition with the gallery.

Ben Gocker’s body of work incorporates drawings, paintings, installations, sculptures, and assemblages. In each, Gocker often takes as his starting point the ephemeral or overlooked -- doodles, marginalia, forgettable chapbooks of self-published poetry, cornerstore books of dreams and numbers -- and pairs them with equally minor materials: sawdust, peanuts, carpet remnants, wood scraps from framers’ shops, and found objects from thrift stores, dumps, and the curb.

With Foskers & Egg Whites, Gocker presents a new body of large-scale assemblages fashioned from carved and painted wood pieces, tin cans, wire, rocks, and newspaper. These new brightly colored, quilt-like arrangements look both forward and backward; many of the pieces in the show include elements from older works which have been disassembled and reincorporated here. Taking their cues from children’s puzzle books and dollar store word search collections, the pieces in the show are straight forward by way of mystery, and mysterious by way of the mundane. In the show’s largest work, The End is the Beginning, words that begin and end with the same letter (Xerox destroyed toast/thermostat sorceress) swirl around an anthropomorphic lion carved from wood who smiles in a frozen trot above either a sinkhole or a supernova. Or both.

Employing a kind of rough and ready marquetry, Gocker revitalizes the reconstructed fragments in this exhibition to propose a new approach to expressionism, materiality, and poetic space.

Ben Gocker (b. 1979, Rochester, New York) lives and works in Tupper Lake, New York. He received an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In addition to participating in numerous group exhibitions nationwide, most recently at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, CT, Gocker has given readings at Simone Subal Gallery, James Fuentes Gallery, and the New Museum. His works are in private and public collections nationally and have been reviewed in Artforum, Art in America, and The New Yorker.