We had the good fortune of connecting with Erik Benjamins and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Erik, what inspires you?
Cookbooks. Everything a cookbook does, is something I aspire to do as a professional. A cookbook celebrates a subjective relationship to place, it is a tool for sharing knowledge, it insists on the powers of the sensory and the social, and it is forever tied to the domestic space.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
I studied Performance and Photography, but ever since grad school, I’ve worked across all kinds of materials, usually learning as I go and collaborating with others. Past projects include a custom-scented hand soap for the bathroom of art space in Hong Kong; a guided audio tour written for the 100th birthday of an early modernism architectural landmark; instructions for an after-dinner walk that emerged as a footnote intervention in an exhibition catalog; a Florentine travel memoir celebrating the butts of public sculpture; bumpy and quite uncomfortable ceramic tiled floor sculptures inspired by reflexology walking paths. Stepping back, it all may seem a bit all over the place, but ultimately it’s all connected by a fascination and belief in the powers of our bodies to relate and learn from space and each other. These day’s I’m most excited about the ceramic tiles and their potential as design tools as well as how my work is engaging writing as a creative practice in both conventional and weird ways. Ultimately, working in the messy gray area between disciplines and categories can ask quite a lot of the viewer or participant, but I hope that such an investment encourages slow reflection and poetic conversation.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
I’m pretty food motivated, so if we’re starting the west side and moving east, it’d be something like this: slice of pie at Fat + Flour, soon to open in the west side; lunch at Sapp Coffee house in Thai Town; coffee at Endorffeine in Chinatown; dinner at Yum Los Angeles DTLA. Art and design stops along the way would be places like the Hammer in Westwood; Watts Towers in Watts; Nonaka Hill and BDDW, both in Hollywood; Dosa and Departmento, both in DTLA; and Marta in Silver Lake. On the way back to the airport, I’d recommend a walk or bike along the beach strand, anywhere in the South Bay (my favorite thing to do in all of LA).

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
Dedicating this Shoutout to my wife who keeps me grounded and focused!

Website: http://erikbenjamins.com

Instagram: @erik.benjamins

Other: http://avoidingthebummerness.com (my website for my writing)

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