Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Sculpture, Painting, Sound
Website: instagram.com/benjamin_vilmain
Benjamin Vilmain is a San Francisco-based multidisciplinary artist who grew up in Iowa, where childhood experiences at carnivals, county fairs, and parades laid the groundwork for the visual and sonic vocabulary of his practice. He earned an MFA from California College of the Arts in 2012 and has since maintained a studio in San Francisco, where he is a resident artist at the Minnesota Street Project in the city’s Dogpatch district.
Vilmain’s work has been presented across a range of Bay Area institutions and artist-run spaces, including Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Berkeley Art Museum, the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, Jack Hanley Gallery, and Southern Exposure. In addition to his visual art practice, he performs music and sound under the moniker TIS 'KID — an acronym for “Trust In Self, Keep it Dumb” — looping his own vocals over ambient field recordings and collaborating on related sound projects.
Vilmain’s sculptures, paintings, and sound works fuse the garish, exuberant aesthetics of the carnival midway — cheap prizes, layer cakes, homemade games — with close attention to the Bay Area’s physical landscape: its marine life, forested hillsides, and cycles of urban development and decay. An incessant photographer and collector, he translates these dual preoccupations into what has been described as “wiggly corporeal abstractions full of childlike whimsy and interdimensional possibility,” works that carry the sensory surplus of popular spectacle while remaining rooted in local environments and embodied experience. His performances foreground the movement of the body rather than the placement of objects, and his sculptural installations share this emphasis on process and gesture over static display.
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