Ben Hornyak: Making Friends

Website: https://www.uglybuthappyart.com/

Artist Statement

As an artist, I often find myself exploring the ugliness in things; in the world around me, and most actively, in people. Namely, I find myself attracted to the idea that everyone is inherently disgusting, both internally and externally, but that simultaneously people are diabolically beautiful. I believe that that dichotomy is a universal truth of what it means to be human. There is no good without bad. There is no beauty without filth. With too much of one, you become the other, and that deprivation of one is the vacancy of both. In every single person, that dichotomic scale tips back and forth in an unspoken expression of a human equilibrium. My art is an expression of this. It’s an exploration of us: a celebration of our faults, and a critique of our beauty.

In the pursuit of these thoughts, I find my work featuring people which take the shape of what society considers ugly. I emphasize “grotesque” facial features like overly large noses, beady eyes and too-well-defined teeth. I fill my work with over-plump bodies and genderless androgyny in which any number of secondary sex attributes are over-emphasized. I mean to depict relatable humanity in figures which, by virtue of their exaggerated features, overly fleshy bodies, and odd postures, feel willfully uncomfortable, and yet are humorously and undeniably human; they are aspects of people you might be, know, or love.

I tend to work with raw materials and the prospect of motion. I am an animator and a sculptor, having explored digital and stop motion animation, as well as having worked in wood, plaster, stone, bronze, and a variety of other materials. Both of these disciplines are especially human-centric arts. A sculpture is something monumental. It is deliberate, and so to explore a surface’s finish, toolmarks, material, joinery or anything else is to explore the person which made it; It is a self-contained consciousness. Animation, likewise, is the practice of expressing life through motion. It is the forging of animacy; the language of the living. These two things combine into something beautifully human, expressive and ready to be flawed.

In this, I find my aim as an artist; to find life-filled moments of innovative overlap between animation and sculpture, and push them to the limit of their fruition. All of my work exists on a spectrum between these two disciplines. In the past, my work has taken the shape of fine-arts stop motion animation, which I see as a type of sculptural animation. Currently, I am engaged with animatronics, which I see as a means of animated sculpture. Through my current exploration with these moving sculptures, I mean to showcase something obstinately imperfect, beloving of the mundane, and experiential; haphazard and ramshackle in its construction and better for it, and wholly expressive of the stupid joy and dumb beauty present within everyday normalcy. My work is an expression of life- the spark of life which lies within materials expressed through human motion and emotion: flawed, disgusting, boring, beautiful.