ART FAIR (October 5 - 8, 2017) Carbon 12 at the SUNDAY Art Fair 2017

In “A Thousand Plateau’s” Deleuze and Guattari use the term ‘plane of immanence’ to signal a turn away from notions of transcendence, pre-existing forms and original genesis. Sayal-Bennett’s new works: ink drawings and one sculpture, which she considers to be a drawing in the expanded sense, manifest as a series of invitations. She is concerned with what the viewer ‘does’ or ‘makes’ with the drawings, as their significance is nothing more than their connection. The drawings have no discrete or closed identity; instead associations, memories and specific visual literacies are brought to the drawings by the viewer, so that the ‘work of art’: the set of connecting relationships between the viewer and the drawings, constantly changes.

The drawings appropriate the vernaculars of common diagrammatic systems such as architecture and design, without prior referents. By making simulacra drawings, drawings which simulate a signified or appear to refer to real objects, Sayal-Bennett explores how, through the interpretive process, a referent is created. The referent is not a physical object to which the drawing supposedly refers, but the viewer’s experience of the perceived referent. This is instated through their operation of use or ‘reading’ of the work. The referent, or the experience of it, which are one and the same thing, is created through the encounter of the viewer and the drawing, and exists only after this relation is formed. In her new work, Sayal-Bennett aims to productively exploit this temporal distinction, the way in which the referent exists only after it is created by the interpretive process. She is interested in how new ‘signifieds’ are created through such operations of use and how this reverses the chronology of normative referencing.

Amba Sayal-Bennett (b. 1991, UK) lives and works in London, UK. She received her BFA from Oxford University (UK) and her MA in The History of Art from The Courtauld Institute (UK). She is currently finishing her PhD in Art Practice and Learning at Goldsmiths (UK). Amba Sayal-Bennett’s work engages with the effective potentials of everyday life. The ordinary can be understood as a shifting assemblage of things that happen and are felt in impulses, encounters and habits of relating. These things that happen are intensive and immanent, and evade meaning and representation.

Amba Sayal-Bennett / Left: Jump Bug, Ink, pro-marker, graphite on paper, 21 x 14.8 cm, 2017 / Middle: Claptone, Ink, pro-marker, graphite on paper, 21x14.8 cm, 2017 / Right: Krustin, Ink, pro-marker, graphite on paper, 21x14.8cm, 2017 / Courtesy of Carbon 12 and the artist

Amba Sayal-Bennett / Kit Wak, Ink, pro-marker, graphite on paper, 29.7 x 42 cm, 2017 / Courtesy of Carbon 12 and the artist

Amba Sayal-Bennett / M Drake, Ink, pro-marker, graphite on paper, 29.7 x 42 cm, 2017 / Courtesy of Carbon 12 and the artist

Amba Sayal-Bennett / Mala, Ink, pro-marker, graphite on paper, 29.7 x 42 cm, 2017 / Courtesy of Carbon 12 and the artist

Amba Sayal-Bennett / Thopi, Ink, pro-marker, graphite on paper, 29.7 x 42 cm, 2017 / Courtesy of Carbon 12 and the artist

Amba Sayal-Bennett / Toast, Ink, pro-marker and graphite on paper, 21 x 14.8 cm, 2017 / Courtesy of Carbon 12 and the artist

Amba Sayal-Bennett / Left: Snoop, Ink, pro-marker, graphite on paper, 21x14.8cm, 2017 / Middle: Shale, Ink, pro-marker and graphite on paper, 21 x 14.8 cm, 2017 / Right: Nero, Ink, pro-marker, graphite on paper, 21x14.8cm, 2017 / Courtesy of Carbon 12 and the artist

Amba Sayal-Bennett / Woodstock Shot, Ink, pro-marker, graphite on paper, 21x14.8cm, 2017 / Courtesy of Carbon 12 and the artist

Amba Sayal-Bennett / JK Stretch, MDF, Spray Paint, Acrylic, 449 x 71 x 47 cm, 2016 / Courtesy of Carbon 12 and the artist