Patricia A. Bender

Curiosity.  A willingness to embrace chance and serendipity.  An openness to experimentation. These are critical elements in my creative practice because they allow me to lose myself in my work and be surprised by what I create.  

I am a strong proponent of mastering your craft.  Once you have done so, the real fun begins. You can test the limits of what you’ve learned, break all the rules you’ve been taught and set out on your own unique path of artistic expression.

In the work selected for the f22 edition I was trying to break free from the more formal structure + rules of geometric abstraction + instill a feeling of whimsy + fun in the images. 

Patricia A. Bender is a photo-based visual artist living and working in New Jersey and Michigan. She began studying photography in the early 2000s, and was hooked from the moment she shot and developed her first image. She works exclusively in the darkroom with black and white media, and personally creates each image from the moment it is conceived through the finished gelatin silver print.  She has recently added drawing to her artistic practice, and often uses her drawings as paper negatives in the darkroom to create unique cliché-verre prints.

Bender has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and internationally.  She is an artist on the curated White Columns artist registry, and is the recipient of numerous awards for her work, including being named to the 2018 Critical Mass Top 50 and as a 2020 Critical Mass Finalist.  Bender’s work has been published in Harper’s Magazine, The Hand Magazine, Lenscratch, The O/D Review and Analog Forever Magazine, among others, and is held in the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Michigan State University, as well as many other public, corporate, and private collections.