Ben Sander’s latest body of work, “Poppies,” centers on the opium poppy flower. The show is separated into two rooms, the main gallery floor featuring acrylic and airbrush paintings on wood panels and the lower loft room exhibiting the artist’s colored pencil and ink drawings. This mesmerizing show presents a cacophony of comic art influence, pop surrealism, fluid animation on loop and dispose of the viewer’s pain from a year of loss, heartache, and nightmarish reality that no one has been safe from, no one has been untouched.  

The colored pencil and ink drawings are predecessors to the paintings, acting as sort of initial blueprints to the larger renderings. The drawings have a significantly more hand-made feel to them, raw with almost undetectable imperfections. This contrasts the paintings on wood panel, whose airbrush use looks almost indistinguishable from a digital rendering. 

Installation view courtesy of Ochi Projects

Opium Poppy With Supplicants (2020), parades cartoonish skull-like heads with eyes and tongues, looking up and reaching out with their mouths after the opium flower. Its shape resembles that of a Hookah, which is a little more obvious in Opium Poppy With American Skull (2020). To the viewer, this indicates that opium wasn’t always used the way it is now. The insatiable supplicants look like a bad trip, seemingly blissful and intoxicate spiraling out of control into a miasma of symbolism surrounding death, addiction, and desire. Sander’s Flower drawings, spanning 2018 through 2020, display a sense of geometric abstraction, similar to that of Rudolf Bauer, yet morphs subtly into something of minimalist pop-surrealism when brought into painting form. 

Installation view courtesy of Ochi Projects

Once you come upon Opium Poppy With Toyota (2020), it’s almost as though the artist winks at you for a moment. This brings us back to the Hookah-resembling poppy. A dichotomy arises, visually and aesthetically representative of those groups which try to resist the American Empire. The beauty of the poppy in close proximity to the beauty and allure of globally popular logos, branding, and consumerism. As if to say, “Are you picking up what I’m putting down?” in regards to the undeniable connection at play between capitalism and opium. 

“Poppy” by Ben Sanders 
Ochi Projects
December 5, 2020  – January 30th, 2021