Benjamin Love – Modern Art – Room 225

Author: Amy O’Brien

Coming around the corner of Capitol and Main I didn’t know what to expect. The ad in the Boise Weekly merely said under the listing for the Egyptian Theatre “Didactic: Fantastic”. I was immediately taken by the clownish costume of a man dressed in silver spandex leggings, tight yellow swim shorts, light blue face, and a red bowler hat. He was scampering franticly seating people in his makeshift classroom replete with chairs and projector screens. There was a man wearing a pinstripe suit standing on a ladder. The clown franticly grabbed VHS cassettes from a mountainous stack and ran inside the theatre with them. I sat down to watch the action as the other pedestrians did. Inside the window he hacked apart the cassettes with an old double-headed hatchet, and extracted the film. When he returned to the street side viewing station he handed reels of film to the man on the ladder, and provoked the passers by to unwind the film. Black VHS film littered the street. The clown fidgeted anxiously and smiled maniacally for the duration of the show, and the man standing on top of the ladder remained as still Buddha.

B. Love is a contemporary mixed media artist whose work has been shown and collected regionally, nationally and internationally. He lives and works in Idaho.