Amy Bennett - Baggage

Richard Heller Gallery is pleased to present Baggage, a new exhibition of paintings by New York-based artist, Amy Bennett.

Artist Statement: The paintings in Baggage survey mid-life and its accumulations, both physical and emotional. See the pile up! The stuff we’ve ordered, the commitments and mistakes we’ve made, the relationships and lifestyles we've developed, teeter on the crest of midlife. Nudged by signs of aging, we evaluate to determine what's worth keeping and what we wish we had. Like a collection of short stories, these paintings quickly and concisely immerse into scenes: an exchange of children between separated parents in a parking lot; a family getting comfortable in a hotel room; a woman living in the woods; a hoarder amidst his collection. I reread Shirley Jackson’s stories "The Haunting of Hill House" and "We Have Always Lived in the Castle" while staying at an artist's residency at The Avalon on Cuttyhunk Island, a picturesque and isolated estate that out of season must call to mind "The Shining." I returned to the studio burning to paint a mysterious house of former grandeur, one that charts a trajectory and questions the circumstances. The model I created for Estate was based very closely on a home near where I live, and the perilous cliffside drive was inspired by a friend's photos of a visit to a local castle. The anamorphic skulls are both a nod to Holbein's Ambassadors, of course, and stolen directly from a drawing made by my then 8-year-old son Henry. The figures I depict embody my empathy. The paintings are invitations to the viewer to relate and empathize themselves. Empathy is an act of imagination: to put yourself in someone else's shoes and write a vivid enough story for yourself to embody their feelings. I’ve painted from models I make to help me extract images from my imagination and serve as still lifes. Not only does this allow for naturalistic depiction of intimate scenes, but I can assume a sense of remove, like an omniscient narrator, creating a feeling of disconnection and isolation that resonates with my experience. ~ Amy Bennett About the Artist: AMY BENNETT (b. 1977 in Portland, ME) received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1999 from the University of Hartford, CT, and her Master of Fine Arts in 2002 from the New York Academy of Art. Bennett has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at Richard Heller Gallery, Santa Monica, CA; Galleri Magnus Karlsson, Stockholm, Sweden; Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; Brattleboro Museum & Art Center, Brattleboro, VT; and Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo, Japan. Her work has been included in institutional group exhibitions at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY; Bruce Museum, Greenwich, CT; The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Boston, MA, and elsewhere. In 2011, Bennett was selected by MTA Arts & Design to install her mosaic Heydays at the 86th Street & 4th Avenue MTA Station in Brooklyn, NY. Other awards and accolades include the New York State Council on the Arts' Painting Fellowship; John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fine Arts Fellowship; and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Purchase Award, among others. Her work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Boston, MA. Amy Bennett lives and works in Cold Spring, NY.

What to expect:
Painting