Ben Cuevas
With fiber as my fulcrum, I view knitting as a meditative practice, exploring and challenging the gendered constructs and physical limitations of craft. From the political to the metaphysical, my practice is steeped in queer feminist ideologies, with an awareness of the mind, body, and spirit. My work spans a wide range of disciplines including textiles, installation, sculpture, photography, performance, video, and sound.
Identity directly influences my work. As a queer, male-bodied, HIV-positive artist, my practice often speaks to the autobiographical, yet goes beyond the self by making the personal political. I’m interested in seeing what happens when seemingly disparate things come together: masculine/feminine, interiority/exteriority, old/new, comforting/uncomfortable. Throughout its pluralities, I see my work as reflecting the condition of embodiment: exploring the intersections of the mind and body, what it means to have a body, to inhabit a body, to be a body incarnated in, and interacting with this world.
