Benjy Nug is an artist hailing from London, UK. His practice is based on a process of making in and out of the moment.
Striking a balance between physical drawing and painting with digital making, Benjy weaves through themes of hybridity, culture, identity, connection and change in a rapidly moving contemporary society.
I like to make in the moment, often because I catch myself out of it. It's a way for me to stay present.
My work discusses contemporary identity, navigating a sense of self through many different spaces. I’m motivated by the black-mixed experience, the hybridity and movement of culture, technology and life in the cities and cyberspace. Drawing from Karen Barad’s concept of intra-action - the mutual constitution of entangled agency - I take in and funnel my experiences into an inseparable phenomena of pieces.
The process is more complementary to sampling rather than being multidisciplinary. I synthesise different mediums and assets, identifying material with their own purposes into new contexts. Life & technology avert my attentions too often to provide the luxury of focusing on one thing.
That’s partly why I’ve often resorted back to drawing, the default when trying to find some grounding in an increasingly complex society. If I get stuck on ✨life🌊 I can shut it down and just say fuck it, I start some scribbles and off we go. A flow state guides the movement towards an outcome I might otherwise struggle to say, or write with words.
I translate that movement to my digital practices. The process is hybrid, collaging and mixing images and videos, repositioning objects and spaces, and alchemising movement at different speeds and tempos. The energies within collide in ways that make me question how to frame digital material as a whole.
I often won’t immediately understand how or why things come together. Assets such as videos sent via WhatsApp from family in Ivory Coast, screenshots from Netflix and Youtube, selfies, blurry events, brief moments, and drawn animations will come together in compositions through time and memory.
The concept of hiding and revealing remains prevalent as I try to entwine the dynamic and energetic with deeply personal, intimate aspects of life saved on the phone or tablet. The work often comes out somewhere in between figurative and abstract, where some elements are locatable and others ambiguous.
The medium is often the message, where the devices I use are both means to make and share. The touchscreen makes for a more fluid and accessible experience than the monotonous frustration of programming and rendering. Yet our tumultuous relationships with them - as open doors to our personal data and our wellbeing - have also had a permanent impact on contemporary identity, from the way we interact with ourselves and others. For better and worse we are hybridising with virtual identities extending past our bodies.
I created a body of digital experiments encompassing the process developed from drawing and painting. The pieces are results of striking a balance between the cognitive and visceral elements of making, working with multiple assets to create layered compositions in both time and space.
I try to examine concepts of hiding and revealing, reframing digital media, as well as the complexities of a contemporary identity, and how that manifests as we connect through our personal devices.
I draw from lived experience within virtual spaces; texts and videos sent between family in the Ivory Coast weave cultural and colonial stories into digital pattern-works, spread through cyberspace. Screengrabs, static, surfaces, typed text, shots of events, encounters, selfies and memories are rediscovered from my devices and repurposed to explore materiality. Digital media takes new meaning as we continue to hybridise with a virtual experience.
Benjy Nug
This series of drawings is an exploration of hybridity, self and identity through gesture and mark making. The pieces were made in relief to heavy smartphone usage in isolation during the course of the pandemic, and explore the notion that trying to define oneself is like chasing your eyes moving in the mirror. The attempt to see that movement is futile, existing only in the very instant you experience it.
The value lies in the experience of ‘yourself’ as simply being part of the moment. These pieces are expressions of being in and reflecting on those moments.
The period in which the drawings were made were motivated by an examination of black-mixed identity and the continuously hybridising experiences of the African diaspora. When speaking of contemporary mixed identity, I draw from lived experience, cultural collisions and harmonies, and presents in an increasingly digitising world.
