WORK PORTRAITS PORTRAIT WORK by Ben Wolf Noam

Ben Wolf Noam202523The Journal GalleryWork Portraits

labor of love60

Dean KissickLaura AdlerGabriel WinantAshley Mears4

In the expanded field of contemporary art, it is common to consider work and pleasure as one and the same thing. In this sense, it is easy to see how labor rapidly doubles as labor of love, the subtext being that doing what one enjoys is invaluable no matter what. Inhabiting this dichotomy, Ben Wolf Noams book Work Portraits Portrait Work is both a visual exploration of work in the cultural field and a statement of personal artistic intentions. Presenting 60 painted portraits of friends from the art world and culture in general, the book is a compendium of artists, musicians, chefs, filmmakers, actors, writers, and academics depicted while laboring in their chosen workplaces. At the same time, it is also a conceptual reflection on the complex nature of work in the cultural field, the relationship between subjectivity and collectivity, self-representation and belonging. The outcome is a surprisingly heartwarming object, somehow suggesting that work in the arts is never solely an individual affair. As Dean Kissick writes in one of the four texts specifically commissioned for the book with Laura Adler, Gabriel Winant, and Ashley Mears art is a communal project. Furthermore, Work Portraits Portrait Work serves as a record of a specific time and placemost portraits depict people close to Noam himself, often in studios, apartments, cafsbut it does so embodying a fantasy of such time and place. The subjects of the paintings become a community, and this community becomes a character in Bens narrative about what making art today might signify: a representation of what artistic representation could look like.