GREGORY BENNETT

Floratopia I continues artist Gregory Bennett’s exploration of intricately constructed virtual worlds populated by multitudes of de-individualized moving figures trapped in a form of uncanny life; bodies enacting a series of seemingly endless cryptic cyclic rituals, existing in a marginal state, neither dead or undead. Time and space are also ambiguous factors here – the environment rotates past the viewer situated in a kind of metaphysical ‘no-space’ reminiscent of a video game environment.

Here the corporeal body is transformed into proliferating avatars inhabiting a range of environments where existence is either tenuous, or wholly subsumed into a synthetic ecosystem. These spaces can be read as a series of psychological landscapes, as representations of hermetic digital colonies – depictions which fluctuate between the utopian and dystopian, or as figures enacting some enigmatic ceremonial.

This work extend further Bennett’s exploration of a range of environments and settings for his digital performers, taking a meta-creational approach which might at times appear to mimic the appearance of a living system, but which is dependent on a range of virtual processes and simulations. Utilising high-end 3D animation software plant-life is digitally generated, at times echoing, or overwhelming, the formations and movements of the figures.