CRYPT RESIDENCY 2025: BEN STEZAKER

3-7 May 2025
Open daily: 11am-3pm

I am an art artist working mainly with photography, moving image and sculpture.

My role as an artist is to create work that questions the automatic transparency of the photographic image, cutting the viewer short from making the medium disappear in our connectedness to what is represented. Through my image making I aim to create connections between photography and other media of art whether that be through their ambiguity or through finding and documenting unintentional drawings, paintings and sculptures.

I hope to create an awareness of the role of the image through highlighting the medium itself, its obscurity and referring to what is hidden. In this hidden or opaque space, the viewer’s imagination is freed from the ties these image expectations make, allowing the viewer a freedom for imaginary projections. Most recently, I’ve been working on a series of photograms of obscured/ patterned glass called ‘Opacities’. Using cyanotype, black and white and colour darkroom printing processes as well as wet plate collodion ambrotypes. In addition, I have been working on some moving image pieces using the darkroom photograms as individual frames like stop motion animation. I raise and lower the glass in a continuous loop creating a pulsating, kaleidoscope effect as the light fragments and refracts to different focal points.

I also have a number of ongoing documentary photographic projects such as my ‘Bridge’ and ‘Temple’ series. These are images of found unintentional over-painted erasures of graffiti taken on parallel slip roads into London over a period of time. I think of them as ‘Bridges’ between the worlds of visual experience; painting and photography: the gallery and the street. I have also been working on a series of images taken through perforated film on bus windows. The resulting images can only be seen at a distance and dissolve as you look closer. Alongside these I have been collecting a series of books with sun faded covers in junk shops around London and the south coast that I call ‘Long Exposures’. These found images, exposed over centuries, are not fixed and over time will fade to white.

During the residency I plan on using the space to map out a new direction for my work as well as giving me an opportunity to see what I have been doing all together in one space. I’d like to experiment with different forms of installation and scale and I plan on continuously adapting the space as the work develops.

Website: https://benstezaker.com/
Instagram: @Benstezaker
Email: Benstezaker@gmail.com