Minisode: Castaway, Frank Benson

Narrator: Welcome to Artists Among Us minisodes from the Whitney Museum of American Art. On this episode, artist Frank Benson discusses his hyperrealistic sculpture titled Castaway. 

Frank Benson: Hi, my name is Frank Benson. I'm an artist living in New York, working mostly in sculpture and photography. The title was inspired by the archetype of the castaway: someone who's stranded on an island and has to make do with the detritus of modern life to sort of build their own world and survive.

And so he's scraped together all these elements that were kind of a hodgepodge of different eclectic items like the football pants, the suspenders, the mesh shirt, the boots, the horseshoe crab, and the Tide bottle, and sort of created this outfit out of that. And I imagine the Tide bottle as a canteen that he would refill and carry around the island, but it's also a recognized symbol of ocean waste that pollutes the water and floats up onto beaches that are very remote.

I think that artists and a lot of other people are in a sort of precarious position in the world, economically, and they often have to sort of scrape things together from different jobs, different sources. But I also saw it as sort of analogous to the role of the artist who finds ready-made objects and then repurposes them for artistic uses.

I first made this sculpture by working with a model who I chose because he had a very distinctive personal style. We did a photo shoot and while we were doing the photo shoot, he crouched down in that position, which was kind of a surprise.

I often use 3D scans to make my sculpture, but, in this case, it was actually all sculpted in a program called Zbrush using a 3D model. Zbrush gives you sort of like a subdividable mesh that you can move around almost like a digital form of clay.

And then the sculpture was 3D printed in resin, and then it was molded and cast in bronze. Then, it was bead blasted and clear coated. And then some elements were painted black, like the pants and the hat and the boots and the suspenders.

Bronze is a very old material and people have been using it for a long time, but in my experience, I've come to realize why that is: because it has all of these great qualities. It's very resilient to the elements, but it also pours into molds beautifully and captures the level of detail with the pores of the skin and all the wrinkles.

I feel like a hyperrealistic sculpture sort of makes a space more psychologically charged because you approach the sculpture and you, you don't know if it's animate or not. 

And I feel like this one has actually spooked me more than a lot of the other sculptures I've had. When I used to have it in the studio, I would walk in and sometimes do a doubletake because I thought I saw someone crouching in the corner. So even though he's sort of hiding and maybe hunting, there's a lot of pent up energy that feels like it's going to pop out.

Narrator: Artists Among Us minisodes are produced at the Whitney Museum of American Art by Anne Byrd, Nora Gomez-Strauss, Sascha Peterfreund, Emma Quaytman,  Audrey Wang, and Christine Zheng.