Ben R. Clement
Spermatorrhoea
September 10 - October 12, 2019
The work shares the consciousness of a particular individual by the name of Wilhem Kannengeisser, whom Clement met as he sought out decommissioned molds from the plastic industry in southern Germany. Kannengeisser had the stash Clement was looking for, as well as a side business in dick pumps. Clement scored the molds and several extrusion screws, big long dongs used to liquify the plastic. He cast a heap of baby doll legs plus an empty petrol canister, then mounted the uncut product on steel prongs. The screws he sat in a hot tub of copper for much too long, giving them the penny shine.
A second man also shares company with Clement, a saddler by profession and cowboy by memory from South Dakota, Mr. Lonnie Smith. He milled two McClellan saddle trees on a postwar duplicator saw, a large shish-kebab style object copier. The McClellan was the military standard of saddle from the American Civil War through to the Second World War, and are nowadays only pulled out of storage for the occasional ceremonial outing. Heavily electroplated and left in element to patinate, these two saddle trees hug the curves of the column like the back of a horse. All this and a strand of electroplated copper wire, entwined with Minnie Mouse shoes torn off a Louis Marx plastic toy, is Spermatorrhoea.
Ben R. Clement was born in 1989 in Wellington, New Zealand. He lives and works in New York.
For more information, please contact Mike Egan at mike@ramiken.biz, or call (917) 434-4245.