Ben Durham

In intricately detailed drawings, Ben Durham explores his life and how it intersects with and diverges from the lives of his former childhood friends and grade school classmates. In his words: “It’s important for me, as an artist, to shine a light on that awkward territory between me and my subjects, the societal and cultural differences. I’m trying to lay claim to that territory.” In his three-part series from 2011, he produced portraits of his classmates based upon mug shots of them. His “Map Diptychs” uses streets as the foundation to create a topographic outline; “Map Composites” fills in outlines of his acquaintances’ heads with fragmented maps tracking their whereabouts.. For his best-known series, “Text Portraits” (begun 2002), Durham pulled photos of his old classmates from an online database, then transformed those shots into large-scale, realistic drawings composed entirely of words associated with his memories of his subjects.