‘Real Amazing!’ by Benjamin Cabral curated by Lauren Powell
SPRING/BREAK Art Show 2020, Los Angeles | February 14 - 16
Benjamin Cabral is a multidisciplinary artist whose bead and rhinestone encrusted paintings and sculptures straddle the line between craft and institutional contemporary art. His work is largely autobiographical and performative in nature, creating an honest, yet inherently unreliable, portrait of the artist examining the intersections between trauma and nostalgia, joy and sorrow, and the digital and the analog. Cabral’s paintings are conceived digitally, and the pixels are then transferred to the panel through the meditative application of beads.
For SpringBreak Art Show 2020 Cabral installed a site-specific room-size installation titled “Real.Amazing”, the slogan that the popular though controversial SeaWorld uses today. This installation presents an amusement park pastoral examining memory, autobiography, and nostalgia. The richly ornamented surfaces employ the vernacular of both belabored craft and seductive commodity to create an artificial Arcadia both joyous and melancholic. Every surface is touched by Cabral’s hand, and like most of the fabricated joyous amusement parks we visit today. The figures, both sitting and standing, speak towards family and the involved emotions and relationships.
In this entertainment based economy that we live in, we spend so much time and energy creating superficial joy and fabrications of the experience of joy rather than joy itself. We do it for the 'gram; going on roadtrips to smile in front of street art and post the photograph for further consumption, the end goal more than the trip itself. Joy becomes yet another promise of capitalism available for purchase, yet these excessive purchases made chasing the commodification of joy rarely lead to the pure feeling. Are we even able to differentiate between the "faking it" and "making it"? The blur between the two is only reinforced in the amusement park. As Baudrillard noted, "The Disneyland imaginary is neither true nor false: it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the real." Man-made theme parks promise “the happiest place on earth”, but this experience never comes without a high monetary price. Once you enter one of these “magical” worlds, you are forced to further perpetuate this excess with all the add-ons to the experience. Whether it be merchandise, photos, collectors' items - we are forever sold on more fabricated joy. In these immersive worlds one becomes completely oblivious to the exploitation happening constantly around you. “Real.Amazing.” transports the viewer to a bright, colorful, whimsical, excessively adorned dreamland while encouraging them to look behind the curtain in order to discover a way to bring actual, pure joy into their life.