Gregory Bennett
Nature Morte

Nature Morte (2017) HD video, 13 minutes, 22 seconds looped.

Torsade III (2017) HD video, 8 minutes, 15 seconds looped.

Nature Morte presents new video work from Gregory Bennett. This work draws on a number of sources including the art historical term Nature Morte, (referring to the genre of still life painting, literally ‘dead nature’), conceptions of the ‘hyperobject’, term coined by Timothy Morton to describe transcendent and massively distributed phenomena (a feature of global ecological crisis), and Benjamin H. Bratton’s notion of ‘The Stack’ – accidental networking megastructures created by planetary-scale computation.

Using 3D animation Bennett harnesses the underlying organisational and visual narrative and computational structures of the database, the loop, the grid and the panorama to structure an endlessly rotating landscape through a panoptic point-of-view. Exploring notions of how nature and culture are subject to systems of control and chaos, both animation and simulation techniques are explored in a 3D virtual environment which is at once familiar and strange in its uncanny use of mathematically perfect forms and algorithmically generated motion in a facsimile of real world space, geometry and physics.

Gregory Bennett is an artist renown for his work with 3D animation, motion capture, projection mapping and virtual reality. He has exhibited both nationally and internationally, including in Australia, the USA, and Europe, and his work is represented in both public and private collections. Notable recent exhibitions include the real-fake.org.2.0, a survey of international digital artists at the BronxArtSpace in New York, USA, the juried exhibition at the ISEA2016 Hong Kong, 香港 Cultural R>evolution, 22nd International Symposium on Electronic Art, Hong Kong and the Supernova 2017 Digital Animation Festival, Denver Digerati in the USA. He also participated in Friday Flash No.10 “Digital Animation NOW!, Denver Digerati/2015 Biennal of the Americas, Denver USA. He was also a finalist in the 7th Screengrab International Media Arts Award in Australia in 2015, and was selected for the Video Contemporary exhibition at the Sydney Contemporary International Art Fair in 2015.

Other exhibition highlights in 2016 were: Huixiang, of echoes: Artists in Chengdu–Auckland, Art Museum of Sichuan University, Chengdu, China and Filmideo 2016, Index Art Center, Newark, New Jersey, USA

More recently he participated Digital: The World of Alternative Realities, Justin Art House Museum, Prahran, Victoria, Australia. Following on from his participation in Divine Abstraction at Justin Art House in 2016

Bennett Lives and works Auckland is currently the Head of Department for Digital Design and Visual Arts at Auckland University of Technology.