BIO

 

     Michael Benedetti is an artist and writer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He has a BFA in Sculpture from Syracuse University, a MFA in Printmaking from The University of Georgia and has been awarded multiple solo exhibitions and artist residencies. Most notably are a one-month residency at the Vermont Studio Center, a three month residency at The Academy of Visual Arts in Ghent, Belgium, a twelve month residency at The Lawrence Arts Center and most recently a solo exhibition at Artlink Contemporary Gallery in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Michael currently works as a fabricator for Target Photo Studios and as a framer for the Katherine E. Nash Gallery at The University of Minnesota.

 

SYNOPSIS

 

     Sketchbooks have always been a way to get ideas out of my head; a home for unedited drawings and unrestrained ideation. They are an opportunity for me to push an idea only so far before its realization in a different media, typically prints or sculptures. Loose isometric drawings, single words or whole paragraphs frantically written, bare line work or graphite scribbles. These components fill my sketchbook pages before they are collaged together to create something new: series of finished artworks utilizing systems and modular, repeating imagery.

 

Snippets extracted from my sketchbooks are transformed within these systems into something else entirely by the time the viewer has a chance to experience the finished work of art. Until The Codex Project, I viewed all of these sketchbook components as steppingstones to a larger, more involved concept, image, or series of images; works that can be framed or finished or perfected and then exhibited. Codex has provided me an opportunity to combine these two separate approaches into an object that exists on its own, without the need for further transformation. The sketchbook is now the art object. And my Codex sketchbook is a vessel for a vocabulary of components that reveal the inner workings of my ideation processes and provide the viewer with a specific, unrefined language of intuitive mark making.