RICHARD GOLDSTEIN Andy Warhol once said, "I never fall apart because I never fall together." Sometimes, I think about that in your paintings…are they falling together or falling apart?…and does it have to be either? You have written about your interest in the underlying anxiety in objects, the possibility for rupture and surprise in all things. In dismantling objects, you also disrupt notions of interior and exterior.  Is this point of view applicable to your work?  In this sense, is there a political statement you are making about our relationship to space?

BEN GRASSO I've been interested for a long time in the ways people move about their surroundings. There is this great book that's out of print called Life Between Buildings which is a sociological survey of the effects neighborhood spaces have on the behavior of those who occupy them. For example, when a street is very wide the likelihood of someone to cross the street and interact with someone from the other side diminished. Or if there is a more direct route than a given paved pathway, it is noted people begin to follow instinct and carve their own, like trails in a forest. I like that idea a lot and it stuck with me. I decided I would do my best not to let such arbitrary boundaries get in the way of where I felt like going. 

RG Your touch is so painterly, but have computer renderings of architecture influenced your perception and play with space?  How about special effects in film?

BG Our generation has an intuitive understanding of this visual-based evolution of computers because we've lived through its humble and crude beginnings and have seen the evolution of what it is today. It’s mapped in our minds now.  But, I mostly work from memory, observation, and photos of places I've been…trying to reconstruct the experiences I've had in specific places but with or without using actual pictures of the places.

RG There is such a negative connotation with the word explosion. Suspension seems a more neutral term than destructive. Is it accurate to say your interests lie beyond the shock of disaster to an exploration of structure and formal relationships?

BG Yeah—I don't like that the word explosion has been used to describe my paintings; you're right that suspension seems more apt. I think in some of those older paintings I was using what looked like chaos to open up more room formally to basically be able to construct any situation I wanted.  I was working on a lot of landscape paintings and wanted to find a way to break the horizon line…to look at the subject in a less familiar way.  I guess Julie Mehretu figured this out long ago as a strategy for “representational” painters to make an “abstract” painting. I hate both of those words which is why I put them in quotes…it’s like grammar prison.  For me, I'm more interested in the logic that makes things appear to be “real” or to possibly exist in the world. I also can sculpt and build a lot of useable things like furniture and buildings, so I understand the rules of both building actual things and the rules in representing them. I like that painting can be freeing from these corporeal regulations that sculptures can't set aside. 

RG Is Gordon Matta-Clark an influence at all in your work?

BG Yes! Although, I feel like he already made everything I've ever wanted to make. At the very least, there is a mutual interest in our desire to understand how objects exist in space. That’s so general, but those pieces required so much engineering. This idea of absence being the sculptural object is fascinating.

RG Despite being separated and fragmented, there is an incredible sense of wholeness in your work because of the inter-relatedness of parts between objects through space.  How do you move through a painting?  How do they develop?

BG I usually start from some scribbled drawings of things or places I've been thinking about. Working on a show, I sometimes find myself fighting the impulse to make a finished piece. So I'll work on many paintings at once…every painting can offer escape from another. I like that freedom. I don't approach paintings with some image or some narrative strongly set in my mind. It’s more a process of building and erasing. In that way, I think of what I do as different than some representational painting which might be characterized as allegorical. In that kind of work, the process is limited to illustrating this idea.  I think, different from my work, that kind of painting has a set goal in mind. To remain out of the confinements of this kind of representational painting, I try to emphasize process. Recently, I was reading an interview with Jeff Wall. He mentioned that he doesn't believe that pictures can be narratives; that they can only imply a narrative. I like that idea …and that may relate to what I make too.

RG In Rust Belt, we have rooted your work in the economic collapse of your hometown. Is there any narrative or context with this latest set of work?

BG With Rust Belt I was thinking a lot about Cleveland as capitalism gone wrong. But now that things everywhere are getting so shitty I was trying to think of places I remember, that I liked for some reason or another. I guess that is kind of escapist. But a recent trip to Joshua Tree, where I came across the work of Noah Purifoy, helped change that. Oddly, he's another sculptor; I guess a folk/outsider/whatever. There is something so great how his work deals with light and the climate in the desert. They are mostly collected junk—bicycles, metal scraps, wood, old vacuum cleaners, etc.—on this large lot, like a sculpture park. The amazing thing is that there are trenches dug and huge buildings he has constructed. Anyways, the West in general has been on my mind. I found myself suddenly having an urge to move away from New York to somewhere isolated. Go margins!