b'Ben BuswellAll at OnceSam HoppleBen Buswells work is accessible in its tactility and tangibility, though the intrigue of his artistic practice lies in the fact that it dwells in the spectrum between the physical and ethe-real. The absence of symbols and direct representation in the work is rooted in the artists mistrust of images and iconic tropes. Pushing his practice toward abstraction, Buswell is heavily influenced by existential ideas and phenomenology, as well as concepts derived from Affect Theory. Buswell also finds inspiration in texts written by such varied thinkers and art historians as Thomas McEvilley, Erwin Panofsky, and Thomas Pynchon, among others. He is interested in phenomena that upend our logical expectations and reveal the strange lawless-ness of the universe. His artistic practice is driven by an impulse to seek out such loopholes and break his own expectations of what art is supposed to be. By unraveling the bounds between media through his process and disrupting imagery, he destabilizes the viewers expectations as well, inviting us to exist on this liminal plane with him.Buswells All at Once (2017) is a series of seventy-six sculptural photographs. As a sixth- generation Oregonian, Buswell often sources his imagery from the natural landscape of the region, and uses photography as a starting point. To create All at Once, Buswell obfuscated the surface of a series of original images of obsidian taken at the Newberry National Volcanic Monument. He pressed and scratched into the emulsion of the prints using a tool of his own making: two etching needles at each end of a cork wrapped around a tattoo grip. In so doing, he irrevocably altered the image, reinventing the context from which it was drawn and undo-ing and reinscribing what it depicted.In essence, a photograph is a two-dimensional representation of the three-dimensional world. Buswells technique alters this constraint, resulting in compositions that undulate with texture and depth. Though cutting and effacing is considered a destructive act, there is a beauty in the physicality of Buswells gestures that nods to the performative. As he engages his body in repetition over a period of time, in a literal sense he objectifies the image to render it anew. The photograph, which was initially a visual index of obsidian, also becomes a layered record of this act of mark-making. Once the cuts are complete, each print is housed 28'