Shannon Benine
born 1978 / Tacoma, Washington
lives and works in Columbus, Ohio
Shannon Benine is an internationally exhibited, interdisciplinary artist working within photography, video and installation art. She received her MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago and her BFA in Photography and BA in Interdisciplinary Visual Arts from the University of Washington in Seattle. Benine's work has been widely exhibited and is included in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago and the National Centre of Contemporary Art in Moscow, Russia. She has received grant support from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, the Midwest Society for Photographic Education and the University of Illinois at Chicago. Benine works as an Assistant Professor of Photography & Multi Media at Columbus College of Art & Design in Columbus, Ohio.
By presenting politically charged subject matter in a visually stimulating framework, Benine circumvents the impulse of the viewer to avoid the disturbing, luring them into facing what they might otherwise ignore. Focusing on the impact of the current wars and the energy crisis on the domestic lives of Americans, she engages the viewer in discussion and debate. Beginning with a subject that addresses a current issue relevant to her family, Benine creates works that initiate conversations rather than inflict points of view. Posing a question instead of providing an answer, she combines photography, video and sound to create multimedia installations that point at politically charged topics, which deserve our attention and contemplation.
In 2008, Benine began a body of work that was a departure from her previous family-centric political multimedia installations and instead focused on the basic processes and principles of photography. "Crystal Visions" uses photography to invent new modes of divination while reconnecting the medium to its past relationship with mysticism and the occult. By combining the use of traditional means of crystal-based divination with color analog photographic paper, she produces color photograms that create a visual tool from which one may derive meaning. While simultaneously focusing on the principle elements of photography, these photograms question the function of a historical modernist aesthetic in contemporary art.
I have accepted a position at Columbus College of Art & Design as an Assistant Professor of Photography & Multi Media!
Take a look at Backspace, the new artists' collective and experimental exhibition space I co-founded in Peoria, Illinois!
Awarded a 2010 Community Arts Assistance Program (CAAP) Grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs.
Read the review of my solo exhibition, Means Without End in Lumpen magazine: Issue 114.
Awarded the Exceptional Artistic Merit in Experimental Film at the Oxford Film Festival in Oxford, Mississippi.
Read my Take 5 with "Westhope: Above and Below" interview for the Oxford Film Festival.
Read the review of Means Without End on Art Talk Chicago.
My portfolio is included in the Midwest Photographers Project (MPP) at the Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP).
The Chicago Project III exhibition catalog is now available on Blurb.
Read the reviews on The Chicago Project III, view images and watch artist talks, from the exhibition.
Awarded a 2008 Community Arts Assistance Program (CAAP) Grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs.
In Transition Russia 2008 exhibition catalog is now available as a pdf.
Read the review of my work by Bill Kouwenhoven in afterimage.
Read the review of my installation at Tacoma Contemporary in The Weekly Volcano.
Read the review of the Centennial Video Special at Crawl Space Gallery in The Stranger.
Awarded the 2008 Society for Photographic Education (SPE) National Conference Adjunct Scholarship through Midwest SPE.
September 19 – 25 / 2011
2011 Pingyao International Photography Festival / Pingyao / China
September 15 – October 2 / 2011
Hartmann Center Gallery / Bradley University / Peoria / Illinois
Reception: September 15, 5 – 7 pm
Thursday / March 4 / 2011
Columbus College of Art & Design / 60 Cleveland Avenue / Columbus / Ohio
Lecture: May 12, 1:30 – 2:30 pm
January 28 – February 25 / 2011
Moreau Center for the Arts / Saint Mary's College / Notre Dame, Indiana
Reception: February 4, 5 – 7 pm
August 30 – September 26 / 2010
Hartmann Center Gallery / Bradley University / Peoria / Illinois
Reception: September 16, 5 – 7 pm
Thursday / March 4 / 2010
Bradley University / 1400 West Bradley Ave / Peoria / Illinois
Lecture: March 4, 9:30 – 10:30 am
February 4 – 7 / 2010
Oxford / Mississippi
Screening: Westhope: Above and Below
January 30 – February 5 / 2010
Gallery 130 / 116 Meek Hall / University of Mississippi / Oxford / Mississippi
Reception: February 4, 4 – 6 pm
July 10 – September 4 / 2009
Catherine Edelman Gallery / 300 West Superior Street / Chicago / Illinois
Reception: July 10, 5 – 8 pm
Shannon Benine via email at
shannon@shannonbenine.com
In 2008, I began a body of work that was a departure from my previous family-centric political multimedia installations and instead focused on the basic processes and principles of photography. “Crystal Visions” uses photography to invent new modes of divination while reconnecting the medium to its past relationship with mysticism and the occult. By combining the use of traditional means of crystal-based divination with color analog photographic paper, I produce color photograms that create a visual tool from which one may derive meaning. While simultaneously focusing on the principle elements of photography, these photograms question the function of a historical modernist aesthetic in contemporary art.
"Means Without End" consists of over a thousand 10” x 10” unfolded photograms of peace cranes, tiled together to form a large multi-media installation. The number of color analog photograms represents the number of American deaths in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom on March 19, 2003. This piece examines this death toll, as well as the way the families of these servicemen experience loss. The kaleidoscopic, geometric pattern in dark reds and yellows evokes images ranging from bullet holes to Islamic screens.
A live video feed further complicates the experience of confronting the numbers; it relates a hazy image of Casey, an unreachable soldier. He symbolizes the vast gap in narrative rent by war, which tears life into a before and after that cannot be bridged. In the sacred space draped with cranes, far-off voices cry out as they undergo a mortar attack. The installation as a whole, entombed in the gallery, stands as a memorial to those soldiers whose lives have been lost.
The first incarnation of this work, showcased at Tacoma Contemporary in 2008, included 267 photograms that symbolized Washington State’s casualties to that date. In 2009 it was exhibited in Chicago at the Chicago Photography Center, with more than 1,200 cranes. This project will continue, appearing in and symbolizing the losses of other states and of the nation as a whole, until it culminates in one large installation representing the total number of war deaths. As the toll mounts, I continue folding and unfolding cranes, creating a microcosm of the war. Because the cranes must be created in total darkness, making this work is a trance-like, meditative act—one that becomes less and less possible as more and more people die overseas.
In the winter of 2006, the U.S. Air Force deployed Casey, a close friend and relative, to Ballad, Iraq. We undertook a collaborative project, incorporating his sound recordings, photographs and perceptions into my work. Through photography, video, and sound, I created several multimedia installations that addressed his departure, deployment and homecoming. "The Regular" is a long-term project that began in 2005, resulting in the creation of the installations "Means Without End," 2008-2009, "Waiting Room," 2006, and "Roadside," 2006.
As wars in the Middle East, rising gas prices, and the search for alternative fuels transform American life, Westhope, North Dakota, rides the tail end of an oil boom. Rigs pepper the harsh prairie surrounding the town. But while drilling depletes this non-renewable resource, my family—and other descendants of Midwestern farmers-turned-drillers—face the challenge of a dwindling livelihood. Fifty years after the discovery of oil, Westhope residents live in the tension between crude and agriculture, between -pump and harvest. As the oil slows, farmers begin to plant sunflowers, canola and other bio-diesel crops.
Westhope residents, numbering 471, are oil men, flush with boom money and transplanting their families to more scenic climes. They are farmers, sometimes lucky and with enough acreage and children to raise show cattle. They are mothers of young children, trying to attract young families to the community to keep the public school open, trying to raise the money for a new swimming pool. And they are the old homesteaders, the veterans of greater wars, who fill their afternoons with pinochle and bingo at the Westhope Senior Citizens Center. Each livelihood, each resident describes one aspect of this community, singular in its prosperity during this national moment of crisis but representative, at the same time, of the turning point at which the nation discovers itself.
Homesteaders first attempted to tame Westhope’s inhospitable landscape in 1904, settling at the westernmost point of the railroad and six miles south of the Canadian border. During the 1950’s, after the discovery of oil in neighboring Canada, test wells found oil in North Dakota. Farm families, previously dependant on unpredictable crops, have become millionaires. What will happen to those that only have claim to the mineral rights, and what future is there for those who have claim to the land? To the South, past the Cold War’s missile silos, Minot Air Force Base attracts no more of Westhope’s young people than it used to. There’s more money working as a roustabout on an oil derrick, or going off to college and then living in Bismarck or Fargo.
In "Westhope: Above and Below," I explore and examine Westhope, its people, and its oil and bio-diesel fields over the course of three years. I search for traces of the adaptation in industry and environment, witnessing the community's return to its agricultural roots-and the coexistence of, and tension between, oil and farming. I document Westhope’s rotting fall crops, its subzero and glacial winters, and its buoyant Fourth of July, noting the continuities and changes between seasons. With simultaneous respect for past and present, I create work that speaks to the future, and to the hopes and fears the future inspires.
In October of 2005, tragedy struck my family, demanding my attention and forcing me to reevaluate what was truly important to me. In "Inheritance," 2005 I began to question the validity of my subjects and shifted my focus to more personal topics. Diane Arbus once said, “A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.” Beginning with my desire to find an image of my cousin after I had learned of his suicide, this piece reflects my frustrations with the unknown—both emotionally and with photography. It speaks to the irony of inheritance, of the incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the expected result. It deals with the paradox of the history of violence and how the closer we look into an event, the less we comprehend. With the use of linguistic and visual representations I examined the relationship between language, image and reality and how these mediums can complement and confuse actual and perceived experience.
Located in Southeast Chicago, the Acme Coke Plant represents one of the last remnants of Chicago’s historic steel-making industry. Operating from 1905 until 2001, the plant has been abandoned and threatened with demolition by a local scrap dealer. Through the efforts of the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois and Calumet Heritage Partnership, plans to save the plant’s most historic structures and turn the plant into a steel labor history museum have begun. However no significant restoration or preservation has officially started and the site is still in a state of neglect and demolition. These photographs of the Acme Coke Plant highlight and question the relationship between industry and the environment as well as the treatment of industrial history in our society.