Published in 101 Contemporary Artists

Ben Sheppee
Feb 21, 2024
3 min read

101 Contemporary Artists (feat. Ben Sheppee)

My work has been included in 101 Contemporary Artists — a book series that showcases diverse artists and their practices, encouraging exploration of contemporary art's emotional and conceptual depth. The publication features artists working across a range of disciplines and geographies, positioning each practice within a wider conversation about what contemporary art is and what it can do.

Being Contextualised

There's something valuable about seeing your work placed alongside a hundred other practitioners. It forces a kind of perspective that the studio doesn't offer. In the studio, the work exists in relation to its own internal logic — the archive, the strands, the research questions. In a publication like this, it exists in relation to other people's answers to entirely different questions.

What becomes visible in that context is what's distinctive about the practice: the specificity of working with an archive of global writing systems, the refusal to treat typography as merely functional, the insistence that letters are visual forms shaped by centuries of cultural movement. Against a backdrop of one hundred other approaches to contemporary art, those commitments read clearly.

Publications as Record

Books serve a particular function in an art career. Unlike exhibitions, which are temporary, and websites, which are mutable, a published book is a fixed record. It places you in a specific moment in time, alongside a specific group of contemporaries, and it stays there. Twenty years from now, this publication will still document that in 2025, this work existed and was considered worth including.

That kind of permanence matters for a practice that's fundamentally interested in how written marks persist across time — how the forms we make today carry traces of systems invented thousands of years ago. Being included in a printed book is, in its own small way, an act of inscription.

About the Book

The '101 Contemporary Artists book series serves as an aesthetic exploration of what contemporary art offers to viewers and how it intertwines with literature. Through this series, our aim is to showcase artists and writers who are actively shaping today's history—individuals worthy of attention, inspiring exploration of the unconventional and unexpected. We aspire to evoke emotions, challenge preconceptions, and provoke introspection, leaving readers and viewers occasionally feeling exposed, vulnerable, yet authentically natural.

artists:

Jessica Guerreiro | Rimin Lim | Ocean Gavin-Mitchell | Tony Perry