image: © Zack Bent, Contusion, 20"x20", archival inkjet print, 2009Buffalo Trace
public reception May 7, 2009, 6 to 8pm
exhibit May 7 to May 29, 2009
www.4culture.org/publicart/gallery

Home and family are the epicenter of Zack Bent’s artwork – photographs and video derived from make-shift historic scenarios which he stages and directs, casting his two sons Ezra and Solomon and his wife Gala as stand-ins. The scenes reference the behaviors of other tribes and communities; for example in Buffalo Trace, Bent focuses on the Boy Scouts, an iconic American institution. Bent’s father was a Boy Scout within the Buffalo Trace Council in southern Indiana. “The tradition of scouting was handed down to me by him. And like the true Buffalo Trace, which was a migratory buffalo path through Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois that acted as road west for early Americans, scouting bears its trace in my life.

image: © Zack Bent, Contusion, 20″x20″, archival inkjet print, 2009