Four Chapters of Love-Camp-Explore-Dreams Exhibition

Love

The show begins with love – and the love we should have for each other. Bill adores color and diversity in his design, and this is reflected in his art where he says the only thing that should be separated by color is laundry. This zone is home to several paintings about racism and convey Bill’s thoughts on what is a very serious issue by playing on color and juxtaposing traditional roles, always with humor and great attention to detail. This section also looks at our world during COVID with a piece called “All they had to do was stay at home and watch TV” where Bill imagines aliens watching COVID reach other space and thinking all those humans had to do was show love for each other, by staying home and watching TV.

Camp

This part of the show is about the idiosyncratic behaviors of the LGBT community – as Bill says, the Friends of Dorothy. Bill loves Thailand for a myriad of reasons, one of them being that people here are accepted, no matter their race or sexual orientation. Here one sees the community in Thailand through Bill’s eyes. Most weekends Bill and his husband Jirachai’s home, Baan Botanica, host legendary parties, and the next morning friends often pose for Bill as he paints.

Explore

In Explore we find a series of paintings and sketches Bill made of the kind people of Papua, which was his last great exploration in December 2019. He travelled aboard a boat called the Kudanil Explorer with a number of friends, including longtime collaborator Jason Friedman and his sister Ann. There they explored remote islands that have existed for thousands of years with extraordinarily little connection to modern society. Bill can speak Indonesian, and as a result Bill talked to people as he drew them learning their stories and writing them on the back of each sketch. A passionate environmentalist, Bill was also delighted by the dazzling array of spectacular fish he saw in the surrounding waters, drawing his favorite from memory rather than consulting books after a dive. After making sketches and watercolor paintings on the spot, Bill returned to Bangkok and created full-scale paintings based off these field drawings. Each painting has an associated original sketch adding a very personal touch.

Dreams

For the last chapter of the exhibition, guests are taken on a journey into Bill’s mind, exploring his dreams and the artwork that comes from them. It is an adventure into the figments of his imagination, starring the artworks such as “Travels with Gramma” which show one of Bill’s muses, Gui, walking through a field of oversized, dreamlike “Kakti” in an imagined Madagascar. This venture into the subconscious and the dream state also ties back to the start of the exhibition – the Bensley Cinema – where guests learnt about who Bill is as a designer, and what BENSLEY does as a studio. Dreams, for designers, are the starting point of everything, and so perhaps the end of this exhibition is just the start of something more for those who came to visit.