Bittersweet Sculpture

Ben Ahles was born in 1986 in Peoria, Illinois. Immediately after his birth, he realized what a mistake he had made and fled to Vermont. There, Ben cultivated a superbly normal childhood until his eleventh year when his thyroid attempted to grow its own body and take over Ben's life. This blatant act of mutiny created an irreconcilable rift between Ben and his thyroid. Before the gland could complete its transformation, Ben had it removed and destroyed. Life more or less went back to normal, but the upsetting possibility that the rest of his body might rebel left Ben confounded. In his young adulthood, Ben has turned to sculpture as a way to gain control over an existence rich with uncertainties. His artwork pulls together objects from his environment to explore the outer limits of day-to-day experiences. Since there is no way to anticipate every blessing and catastrophe, Ben creates his own wondrous and terrible events to better understand the surprises of the world. Leveling the monumental while elevating the mundane, Ben toys with boundaries and inverts expectations. Ben makes gravity variable, and takes away life only to replace it with infinite potential. He spits in the face of convention and honors the absurd. Ben is a creator, and his whims shape reality. All of these practices foster the illusion of god-like omnipotence; a man so powerful he need not fret over the banal concerns of mortals. Perhaps Ben has even convinced himself that these beliefs are truths. But the ghostly whisper of his insubordinate thyroid stays with him, always suggesting that he has no more control over his life than a rat caught in a labyrinth. With these conflicting thoughts forever dueling in his consciousness, Ben scurries along hoping to build something sturdy enough to rescue him from his fate.