Artist name: Ben Dickey

Image: Form ? Function II

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Edition: 1 of 1

Collection

From ART3.io, Edition365 is a once-in-a-century art & photography collection documenting the historic events between 11 March 2020 and 10 March 2021: a portrait of the year that changed everything. 365 days, captured in 365 artworks, now on sale as unique NFT editions of one — with exclusive unlockable content for collectors.

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Caption

Typically, we understand faces to be the emotional centers of human reference. After all, they contain the tools most adapted to conveying nuance and affect – the eyes and the mouth. Despite this, when separated from everyday interaction, we become quickly aware of how much our hands have to say. The hands contain an infinite, gestural expressiveness; a physical library of symbols and utility able to hold, to touch, to grip, to break, to reach, and to feel. They are equally capable of softness and brute physicality. We use them to caress, to create and sometimes, to destroy. Consequently, when we separate our hands from the body, we begin to understand their visceral lexicon, one of need, desire, and elementary interaction. In this series, illustrated against the vacuum of a nebulous, black background, the object permanence, or materiality of the hands takes center stage. They are frozen at infinity, in postures of contortion and fragility meant to instil a sense of unease, solitude and searching. Much like our intellectual and emotional selves, the hands are constantly searching. They are our main way of interfacing with concrete world and therefore, present a notion of the physical extremities of our lives. They are the gateways between what is inside and what is outside. It was this feeling of liminality that guided my approach. I wanted to isolate the hands as the interstitial and therefore existential navigators of our worlds. In light of the pandemic, this image takes on new resonance. For the past two years, we have had to alter the core of how we live an interact; removing ourselves from the outside world, our friends and loved ones, and confining ourselves to prolonged states of quarantine. There is something both deeply intimate and universal about a hand, reaching through the inky dark of its surrounding and out towards the viewer. It embodies, in corporeal exactitude, that desperate desire for contact, for something beyond ourselves.