‘Casual Stroller’ and other screen-based art on display at KCAC’s Screen//Seen

Frame snap from “Casual Stroller” // Provided by David Bennett

Kansas City Artist’s Coalition’s new exhibition “Screen//Seen” is showing screen-based artwork through December, with work by digital artists from around the globe in-gallery. 

KCAC received dozens of applications from artists during their open call, selecting six finalists in video, animation, generative/algorithmic, real-time capture, and net-based applied work, and a variety of perspectives and voices. 

The chosen artists’ work will be shown in person and in a curated online gallery, with one digital artist per month. For August, Nashville-based artist David Bennett is showcasing his work, “Casual Stroller,” a continuously looped video. 

Bennett has a special tie to Kansas City—he previously worked as an art guard at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, where he saw a special exhibit of South Korean artist Nam June Paik’s work that inspired him. He now creates his own screen-based art while working professionally in the television industry. 

“Getting to see that every day was a big influence on me,” Bennett says. “Bringing my own work back to a gallery in Kansas City is definitely a cool, full-circle moment for me.” 

Bennett describes his artwork as high-intensity visuals that are non-narrative: Not fully abstract, but videos that you can experience at any point and understand the feeling and story. The exhibited work “Casual Stroller” is a visual translation of widespread feelings on technology’s effect on real-life connections. 

“A feeling that we’re all sharing right now of that weird overlap of being hyper connected in our digital lives and then maybe totally isolated in the real world,” Bennett says. “I’m just trying to sort of materialize that feeling with the tools that I use.” 

To create “Casual Stroller,” Bennett mounted a camera to his car to drive around Nashville, capturing drive-by footage of everyday tourists and picking out one figure to focus on. 

“I cloned this figure into a line of many multiples to create cycles of it walking in an endless loop,” Bennett says. “You get a conveyor belt kind of motion; it’s always continuing across the frame.” 

While screen-based media is a visual art, Bennett says more goes into the viewing outside of visuals, with sound being a large part of his creations. 

To make a unique, multi-sensory experience, Bennett uses recycled sound materials in his work—incorporating elements from already existing media. 

“Sound is an equally important part of this. The audio that goes along with “Casual Stroller,” I’ve got a driving bass that’s a synthesizer, a sort of droning sound that is the underlying bed of it all,” Bennett says. “It’s mangled samples from an old cassette tape, plus a medical lecture about the effects of recycled office air and how staring at screens can cause an eye infection called keratitis.” 

Digital screen-based art isn’t shown in gallery spaces often, making this exhibition unique. Bennett’s work has been projected on the side of buildings and at projection art festivals, but rarely in a setting like this.

This different presentation opportunity is what drew Bennett to apply for “Screen//Seen”: The lasting experience of exhibiting his work in a gallery context. 

“Festivals are incredible, but they’re very fleeting. Maybe a piece lives for just one pass, then it’s over. There really isn’t the luxury for someone to really sit with a piece and absorb the details in that context, so that’s the thing that’s exciting to me about “Screen//Seen”,” Bennett says. 

For viewers not used to screen-based artwork, Bennett says it will be impactful and have a deeper meaning than they expect.

“Viewers should expect kind of an experimental sensory overload,” Bennett says. “It’s a hybrid mix of loops within loops that are sort of like visual music; I just want people to see the glowing pixels and cycles, and as they look deeper, realize they’re looking at that one individual’s movement that’s been abstracted and electrified.” 

Bennett says his digital creations are for everyone, and any audience member will find a piece of his work to connect with.  

“We’re all overloaded with screens and accustomed to seeing movies and things that behave, so this is a familiar thing in an unfamiliar way,” Bennett says.

David Bennett’s work will be shown at Kansas City Artists Coalition from August 7 – 29. KCAC is open Wednesday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and is a nonprofit organization promoting visual arts in Kansas City.