JACKSON HOLE, WYOMING – MAYA FRODEMAN GALLERY is pleased to present Toward Silence, a solo exhibition with artist M. Benjamin Herndon, on view at the gallery's downtown location from December 19th, 2025 through February 8th, 2026. Herndon’s first solo exhibition at the gallery, an opening reception will be held Friday, December 19th from 5 to 7pm. All are welcome to attend.
Spanning nearly a decade of practice, Toward Silence traces M. Benjamin Herndon’s evolving engagement with the phenomena of light, color and materiality, examining how one’s perception may shift as their physical perspective does. Comprising nine works rendered primarily with metal oxide pigments and graphite, on linen, granite, wood, and paper, Toward Silence embodies Herndon’s union of scientific precision and spiritual inquiry in material form.
Working within a minimalist visual language, Toward Silence invites a deliberate slowing of perception, requiring the viewer’s eyes to adjust and attune to subtle shifts in light and color. Though abstract, his works are deeply connected to both his and the viewer’s lived experience. A flash of light across a waterfall or the faint glow of dawn may not serve as a subject to be depicted, but as a catalyst for creation and an impulse from which the work begins.
Prior to creating most of the works in Toward Silence, Herndon’s work “centered on darkness, and on finding ways for light to emerge from it.”His movement from darkness to light, however, is less a departure from but rather a revelation and recognition of the dualities that have always guided his practice. During a printmaking residency, the artist began experimenting with interference pigments – microscopic metal oxides that shift in color depending on the viewer’s angle and the quality of light. This discovery became a physical manifestation of the unity that had always underpinned his work, in which a single material can contain its opposite. He writes, “It was as if the work passed through a prism and came out the other side with the full spectrum of light and all its glorious color.” His process is guided by curiosity and experimentation, where he mixes dry pigments and applies them with exacting ratios onto surfaces layered and burnished by hand and structures built from carved granite, wood, and paper.
In Toward Silence, Herndon considers quiet as both subject and method – a way of being that resists the noise of contemporary visual culture. His work emerges from a state of deep listening, where sound, light, and material converge in meditative stillness. Translating the rhythms of music and the natural world into visual form, Herndon invites viewers to slow their perception and enter a space of calm awareness – one that moves, as he writes, “toward the silence of contemplation.”
M. Benjamin Herndon grew up in the Sierra Nevada mountains of Northern California and now lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where he makes work in his studio in an historic textile mill. Herndon received his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2016 and his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York City in 2012. He has been an artist in residence at the Tamarind Institute for Fine Art Lithography, the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, and Marble House Project, among others. His work has been exhibited in galleries across the United States, France, Germany, the United Arab Emirates, and China.
