Eden Project

Eden Project created with the School of the Future: www.benvolta.com/eden.html

On Locust St between 15th and 16th

If you are in Center City check out the new Center For Emerging Visual Artists Gallery space. They used the Laurel Wreath image for the signage!

LITHOPHONE

Created with Ringing Rocks Elementary School in Pottstown, PA - Residency with the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts / Philadelphia Arts in Education Partnership. (click images to enlarge)

MIXTAPE
Uploaded by bvolt

MIXTAPE
In Gallery 167 at The Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Ben Volta with The Teen Sketch Club: March 4th, 2009

Cultigen Kunstkabinett

We began by asking ourselves what does creativity looks like, and how do we make it grow? We imagined great marble sculptures growing on vines as grapes and berries and the artwork found throughout the collection growing out of the ground as vegetables in a garden. After exploring the museum with this idea in mind, we sculpted seeds. From these seeds we created drawings to help us visualize our imaginative exploration. Guided by our drawings we sculpted plants and placed them in a cabinet under a magical light. A light, which when combined with our drawings and sculptures energizes the growth of our collective creativity / creations.

Created with the Delphi Art club (6th grade) at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. On view in the education galleries at the PMA for the month of February and March.

Fictions and Fabrications

Our artwork draws from the narratives and imagery of the Constantine Tapestries by Peter Paul Rubens (on display in the great stair hall at Philadelphia Museum of Art), and from stills taken from the animated film Spirited Away by Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki. Our exploration draws from multiple digital reproductions that were captured from the Rubens' tapestries at the PMA and from still captured as watched Spirited Away. We combined our own drawing fragments taken from digital reproductions of both of these artists work to create new individual artworks that visualize our collective exploration. Before creating our final prints, all of our drawings were scanned into a computer and each artist worked with Ben Volta to compose and colorize each individual artwork. We then interweaved all 34 individual artworks together to construct a quilt (inspired by the Gees Bend collective in Alabama, whose work we were also fortunate enough to see in a major exhibition at the PMA). Our artwork does not contain a story in the same way that the large narrative works by Rubens and Miyazaki do. However, we do hope that our artwork provides inspiration for others to imagine new stories that could be written, which is to say, we want our viewers to explore our work in the same way we explored Rubens and Miyazaki, not as a passive observers but as a creative story tellers and active participants.

Created with Grover Washington Jr. Middle School in Philadelphia, PA.

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Our artwork is on view in the education galleries at the Philadelphia Museum of Art for another two weeks. The PMA has hung our work across from my sister Lisa Volta's artwork created with a middle school in Philadelphia. (I will post the info once I get it from her) Both projects are part of the Delphi Art Partners residency that teems artist with Middle School students in Philadelphia.

SIXTH WORLD / BUNCHED UP / 4TH WORLD
Created with Vare Elementary School as part of The Fleisher Art Memorial - Community Partnership in the Arts.(Click images to enlarge and see details)


Kimberly working on 4th World

QUOTES OF INTERPRITATION
“We are combining the nations together to make i a new nation. It stands out and makes you wonder of all the problems it may cause, but you know it is something you love. The thing you may ask is how will we have a source of water? What if we have no air to breath, and how will we all eat?... and that is why we are all separated.” Jaqueeah F.
“All the countries of the world are crumpled into a ball.” James R.
“The middle one looks like the countries are dancing around.” Desire N.
“The countries are mad at each other and they moved apart.” Kalhima Y.
“The two worlds were in a war and they both fell into the sea.” Karima Y.
“It was from many small drawings that we created a whole big drawing. Our big drawing looks like a garden because it grows each day.” Ettina T.
“We weren’t just drawing the flag in the country, we were creating new patterns.” Christina R.
“In our project we used a marker to draw the country and flag with the symbol. I used a country named Portugal. Portugal looks like mountains if you look at it sideways. Henry T.
“We picked different flags from different countries and we drew the country on tracing paper. My picks were Kenya, Afghanistan, and Malaysia. I took the items on one flag and traced it on the tracing paper. When I was done they looked like a newly created flag. Hopefully viewers will think that it is a masterpiece.” Christina W.
“The artwork is about people coming together and people working together. First they were separated then they joined.” Christina R.
“The drawing looks like the earth. An earth made up of many countries, and all in different colors. One drawing looks spaced out. The other looks crowded and the countries overlap. In the first one there is a free world with peace. Then a new world formed. All the countries overlapped and caused violence. It caused people to fight and flee from their country. It also caused natural disasters like tornados, hurricanes, and tsunamis.” Christina W.
“The artwork that is bunched up together can make you think if the world was really like that what would you do? And how would you do it? How would you get water or food? You’ll have to travel across the world. But a good thing about the world being bunched up is you can see and meet different and unique people from all around the world.” Ettina T.

An Expected or Projected State

Our artwork began by transforming the Pennsylvania state seal by rearranging its elements and adding 21st century imagery to create new designs. In our large digital print we combined and overlap all of our designs to create a collaborative artwork.

Created with Vare Elementary School as part of The Fleisher Art Memorial - Community Partnership in the Arts. We are in a group exhibition at The Center For Works on Paper at Fleisher. The show opens Dec 12th.