And Now is pleased to announce Autofiction, Ben Horns’s first solo show with the gallery.

 Autofiction is a literary genre which synthesizes elements of autobiography and fiction. The six oil paintings on view, four of which combine multiple photographs into individual paradoxical scenes, draw their source imagery from the artist’s personal photographic archive. While the contents of the images appear familiar in their generality, the techniques through which Horns constructs them estranges their quotidian status. Nature captured from inside of a moving car or train is sutured into architectural interiors through windows which act like portals into alternate temporalities. The paintings represent the content and visual effects of the original photographs: the placid space and light of the interior scenes and the blurred distortions of the landscape as captured by the camera alike. In coalescing these multiple images into impossible tableaux, Horns’s paintings evoke fractured attention, a state of distanced daydreaming familiar to those who have been stuck in the passenger’s seat.

Horns’s depictions of parking lots, corporate properties, and glimpses of greenery on the side of the road raise these seemingly banal sites to iconic status. The Oldest Tree in Peoria, IL and Darien both originate in the artist’s home state. The former is, as its title suggests, the small industrial city of Peoria’s oldest tree—so old that it predates white settlement of the state.