Neil Bender
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Associate Professor, Painting & Drawing Neil Bender makes paintings and collages that probe fluid practices of gender and sexuality. He recasts imagery exploited by popular culture with seductive surfaces and color in order to form a new interface for open dialogue or experience. In “The Discoverer” (2014), the viewer is confronted by a woman. The subject is an over- tanned Floridian who could be in her late 20s or early 40s, having had too much work done to tell. She spreads herself open in order to uncover the sources of why she did this to herself. The probing is reflexive as the hands she uses are the tracings of Bender’s hands. Beneath leather skin, cultural tropes like Elvis and girls in daisy dukes are uncovered. With humor as a starting point, Bender’s work aims to alleviate the anxiety of desire and fulfill fetishes and fantasies. Neil Bender was born in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, and currently lives and works in Tampa, Florida. His work has been shown nationally and internationally, at the Boston Center for the Arts, the CUE Art Foundation and Gasser/Grunert in New York, the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, the Boston Center for the Arts, Palazzo Casali in Cortona, Italy, The Front in New Orleans, Circa PR in San Juan, Puerto Rico, the St. Petersburg Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, FL, the Contemporary Art Museum at USF, the Jones Center for Contemporary Art in Austin, TX, and many other venues. He received the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant after getting his MFA from the University of Georgia, attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and the Vermont Studio Center. He is co-founder and member of the cooperative gallery QUAID, and is Associate Professor of Painting and Drawing at the University of South Florida. He is currently working towards a solo exhibition at Tempus Projects at the historic Kress Building in Tampa in January titled “Live Her Now”, with a catalog, and will show work with Tempus at the INK Fair in Miami this December. |
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