Small Town USA

Ben Werther’s “Townworld” exists in a place that both is and isn’t. On view at Amanita’s Bowery location through April 20, the artist’s solo exhibition of large-scale acrylic-on-collage works on canvas center on a paradox of site. By creating an aesthetic rooted in his memories and locates it in a fictional world, Werther asks: How do we share a collective memory of a place that doesn’t exist?

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The artist traces his interest in this question to his early fascination with miniature objects, like the model train catalogs he read as a child. “They represent a memory of a place that is both real and not real—a space filled with hyper-specific but empty representations of reality,” he says. In “Townworld,” Werther expands on this fixation, juxtaposing model-train scenery with imagery from early-2000s high school yearbooks he sourced from his hometown of Nashville, Tennessee. 

From far away, it’s hard to tell the difference in Werther’s paintings between the scenes from model-train catalogs and the students from the yearbook photos. In his collage Valentine’s Day Craft Project, 2025, photos of students cutting paper hearts for holiday garlands are presented alongside images of miniature figurines walking into town-square style buildings. Up close, the distinction becomes clear. The conceit here is that archive can become a tromp l’œil, where what appears as a rich tapestry of a local town is actually a construction that only exists within the collage. It is the feeling of history, without the actual history. 

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“Townworld” applies this eye-tricking effect as its greatest strength. The show uses the Internet’s ongoing love affair with liminal space photography—those eerily vacant shopping malls and washed-out office buildings that have become a kind of aesthetic shorthand of today—as a way to both expand upon and critique the idea of the American myth. Werther’s approach is layered, meant to depict cultural death and identity-loss through specific archetypes. As his process unfolded, “the project became about looking at the paintings as their own kind of myth-history hybrids, ” says Werther. “Together they become a new kind of narrative.” Werther describes the model-train landscapes in his paintings as anonymous backdrops rather than meaningful settings. In doing so, “Townworld” is its own system to understand mental images of small-town America as tropes that hold false memories of times of yore that never existed.

Not only is history a construct for Werther, it is also a theme park. “Children’s toys are often based on an idea of what historical events were like without any regard for their actual meaning or significance,” says the artist, citing manufacturers using vikings and medieval knights as stand-ins for media franchises. “We experiment with different identities, much like a child playing with toys, creating a space for personal agency and exploration.” Formally, we see Werther’s own play in the weathered effects and incidental marks applied onto each painting, in which he places a string under the canvas while he paints. The result is an aged-looking impression of the string shape, causing the image to appear older than it is. In Gas Station Laundromat, 2025, the linear string impressions appear as creases on a collage of images of cars painted for pep rallies and roads piled with traffic, as if each photo spent years folded up in someone’s wallet. In the rightmost corner, however, the string etching is shaped like a capital “S,” indicating that what looks like signs of wear are actually artifice. 

So, how is it that we share memories of small town America that never existed? In an era where people consume tens of thousands of images daily, they become primed to project narratives of their own making, of what a bygone time “must have been like” based on vibe alone. “A lot of this work has to do with stereotypes... It has more to do with the way the Internet and Tumblr have made us feel like we have a relationship with things we actually don’t,” explains Werther. His paintings double as a critique: We aestheticize what we’ve never felt. A deeper provocation revolves around how we misremember and repackage history as nostalgia. Werther likens it to a Smashing Pumpkins song from 1995. “The song 1979 is all about this idea of misremembering that time, and then now, from our perspective, that song has become a very canonical encapsulation of the ’90s rock sound,” he says.

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By staging a dialogue between the generic and the specific, the constructed and the remembered, “Townworld” allows viewers to project their own narratives onto it—goads them into forming intuitive connections between themselves and the collages to mimic how people form personalities from engaging with images on a daily basis. The result is a body of work that bucks nostalgia in favor of the mechanisms that create it, underscoring how cultural memory is formed, reshaped, and ultimately, turned into myth.

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“Ben Werther: Townworld” is on view through April 20, 2025 at Amanita at 313 Bowery, New York, NY 10003.

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