Senior thesis:
Social Stories & Patho/logic
artist’s statement
I spent much of my childhood in psychologists’ offices, surrounded by the diagnostic criteria and measurements doctors used to analyze my personality. Since then, I’ve been intrigued by the structures people use to make sense of human experience.
As an artist, I process my experiences through my work, by organizing physical objects according to numerical patterns—a habit that was considered “maladaptive” by my childhood doctors.
From September 2021 to April 2022, I researched, wrote, and constructed my senior thesis, a public gallery installation and written creative non-fiction essay series exploring themes of disability, connection, art-making, and personal narrative.
The sculpture, Patho/logic, won 2nd place for the sculpture category in Pennsylvania Museum’s Art of the State exhibition in 2022. My proposal for the project’s essay series, Social Stories, won my university honors department’s Friends of Murray Library student research grant in 2021.
Social Stories: Bookmaking in the life of an autistic artist
Introduction by Christine Perrin
Something that I love about Anya’s work is her deep structural relationship to form and, in particular, how she sequences the unfolding of a piece of writing, much like the artist books she
makes. You will see or possibly just feel that nothing gets in the way of the stories she is telling,
and that she understands how to bring us close to a moment in a story, but she can also, like a Google map, expand the picture to show us its larger significance to an idea she is presenting and to our own lives. The rhythm of movement from a story to an idea, from a sentence to a paragraph, from a moment to recognition is just right and musically and structurally astute. The patience and stubbornness required to do this is remarkable. Anya has crossed whole territories of wilderness to bring you the insight that includes you. Here is a small example of the negotiations involved in that passage:
“Once again, I was confronted with the problem of explaining the book, in words, to my professor. I’d been reading Donna Williams, and I initially described it in her terms: it was about masking, and the faces you put on to the world to protect yourself from both social judgement and crippling “autistic” isolation. This would have worked well enough for her, but I agonized over the wording—or more specifically, over the word “autistic.” Though I didn’t hate the word itself, I hated saying it. More than anything I hated the image of her sitting across the table from me, measuring out a carefully sympathy.
I excerpt her essay Social Stories here so that you know you look for this skillful craft but also because you are, today, that listener sitting across the table from her.
And finally, I am going to read you two more excerpts to highlight the other thing I love about
this project and Anya’s skill as an essayist and a person—her capacity to grow. What follows is another one of the ‘distances’ she crossed as she beheld with her subterranean attentive capacities that in so many ways and mediums make her our instructor. This is a superpower.
From Numbers where her journey begins:
At eighteen years old, I was determined to figure out what was “wrong” with me, and I strongly suspected the numbers in that filing cabinet would be the key to it. I pulled out every folder, combed through every word on every page. At first, the charts and their visual aids were wildly disconcerting. There was my childhood self, meticulously dissected and arranged into bullet points like dead butterflies on a pinboard. Everything I’d learned to hate about myself, from the blunt earnestness to the speech issues to the notably awkward body language, had been drained of life and stuck in a chart. I had looked to explain what was wrong with me, and the numbers delivered.
Here is where she arrives after years of labor and striving to name:
I didn’t see the parallel need to make sense of the world (on the part of the doctors) until I realized what they had shared in those stapled files and story books not a set of facts or arbitrary standards, but the practice of figuring things out by putting them in a physical form. I had to live with their cold, clinical forms—remake them, find the rhythm in them—to learn that I loved them after all.
Above all, Anya is an explorer on the order of Lewis and Clark. She travels vast territories and beholds, keeps her field notes, and attends until she sees, and then comes back to include us in her understanding.
Patho/Logic – creative process archive
The composition of the sight line running through the piece is based on psychological measurements from my diagnostic paperwork when I was a kid. More specifically, it’s based around the recurring cognitive score 139, which is sum of five consecutive prime numbers. The grids based around these numbers determine the proportions of the windows in the panels.
These abstract measurements of my cognition are juxtaposed with forms scaled to my physical body. For example, each panel is as wide as I am tall, placed an arm span apart. The panels are just tall enough that I can rest my arms on them comfortably and “lean” against them naturally. My bodily dimensions dictate even the smaller measurements, such as the walls’ wood laths being spaced a finger’s width apart.
When viewing the panels along the sight line, the five windows allow the audience to see through each panel and understand how they relate to each other. This also allows the viewer to see the journal pages stashed inside the panels. In older homes, construction workers would often hide papers and other objects inside the walls to leave evidence of their presence, and to mark milestones in the construction process. The journal pages in these walls are evidence of how I marked the history of my own personality’s construction by processing it through writing. Many of these journal pages were also sources for the experiences I write about in Social Stories, allowing another dimension of narrative interaction.
Because these windows are “cut out” of the panels, the audience is able to see the process of their construction in full detail. Each one was built like a traditional plaster wall (ones you would find in older homes), with a wood lath understructure, chicken wire to help the plaster’s adhesion, and two layers of gypsum-based plaster layered on top.
In general, I use my work to physically process my experiences. Through this piece I’m working out how to reconcile the clinical diagnostic models imposed on me with my much less rigidly defined life experiences.
With my use of plaster walls, I’m riffing off the loaded symbolism of clinical, white-walled spaces. But through the process of constructing and hand-plastering them, the piece shifts the audience’s focus to the human “fingerprints” in all these diagnostic structures – even the most rigid walls were built by people, and all these abstract medical models were initially born from people trying to understand themselves and others.
When planning out this piece, I took strong cues from bookmaking. I’ve always been interested in books as a physical space for processing experiences, and I was intrigued to see how that would scale up to a public sculpture context.
Initially, this piece actually started out as a scaled-up accordion book structure to evoke a sense of architectural space. However, the viewer’s physical interaction is core to bookmaking as an art form, and this particular layout made it awkward for the audience to walk around and look through the panels. Normally, an accordion book is intended to be picked up and spread out by the viewer, but this is obviously impossible with large-scale plaster walls.
I addressed this problem by spacing out the panels, focusing on the composition as an installation more than a traditional book object. Since the “book” can’t move with the audience, the audience is forced to move around it and physically interact with it that way.
For this to work, I had to ensure that the various elements of the piece were compelling enough for the viewer to want to do all this movement. For one thing, the spacing between each panel had to be wide enough to walk through so it would be approachable. The windows and their placement at waist-level encourage viewers to crouch down and look through them from different angles. Once the viewer is close enough to do this, the layered surface texture and the various papers and globs of plaster inside the panels encourage them to come close and poke around the piece.
The effect of these elements on the audience was striking. Audience members spent the night of the reception wandering between the panels with their little plates of food, often crouching on the ground to study the plaster. I watched several groups of people use the piece as a photo opportunity, staggering themselves between the panels and poking their heads through the windows for the camera. One of my friends reported that their professor talked about the piece in class–he had expressed a compulsive desire to crawl through the windows like a tunnel. The piece’s accessibility and central presence in the gallery gave people social permission to interact with it in intuitive and playful ways, something that’s often difficult for artist books to accomplish in a gallery setting.
Because of its nature as public art, the piece went beyond its original deeply personal exploration of how I process my experiences, and ended up drawing the audience in to participate in my experiences first-hand. I found that this allowed for a deep sense of reconciliation with these structures of meaning, both for myself and for the audience.
anya benninger 