Opening: Andy Benavides: Goodbye Blue Skies

Andy Benavides, native son of San Antonio, Texas, knows well what commitment to community means. In this exhibition, he pours that sensibility into art.

“My motivation is a lifetime of learning and paying attention. Gratitude for my education, communion, confirmation, and my art teachers—these are how I ended up here on the topic of religion and education. I would grow to conclude that these were weapons to shape and erase the human out of being human. I learned that each of these powerful topics as shapers of our minds were most affective through constant messaging. I understood that they were ill intended and applied through a ‘divergent convergent learning model.’ They were exercised to minimize one’s potential, instill fear and more often the norm to teach in the interest of those that benefit from our lack of individuality. This observation of what I learned is the foundation for what I have witnessed my world become and currently is, a motivation to grow not emotionally, spiritually or academically but to grow as something with measurable value that in the end is profitable.

The dogfight romanticized this notion for me. Twelve air-to-ground fighter planes, one for every month of the year representing 365. These planes of power targeting how we have been labeled, (represented by LEGO figures) to affect our learned outcomes in order to be shaped into dollar valued assets. This disregard for the natural beings we are intended to be I feel is my responsibility as an artist to contextualize and share through emotion. Since the beginning of time, we have lived this way and have made very little progress as we are a constant of history that repeats itself. For every problem there is a solution that creates a new problem. We are total ecosystem that demands connection.”