Small in scale but dense in narrative, the paintings in Amy Bennett’s Shelter at Miles McEnery Gallery function akin to a short story. Each oil on panel encapsulates a snapshot still of a moment, prompting the viewer to draw upon one’s own lived experience to flesh out the lead up and its aftermath. Teetering between subjective realities and familiar memories, Bennett mitigates serene compositions with the unsettling: a sunbather lounges under the moon, a sleepwalker drifts through the home, a family gathers for breakfast in a flooded kitchenette.
Rather than painting from memory or photographs, Bennett begins her process by building miniature models. Vignettes of sprawling nature preserves and domestic interiors set the scene for figurines dressed in custom tinfoil garments frozen in place. Elizabeth Buhe writes, “Bennett’s works are not just technically brilliant repositories of painted form; they are texts that query the circulation and sedimentation of images, or perhaps memories, and how these come to snap us.”
Accompanying the exhibition is a fully illustrated publication featuring essays by Robert Long Foreman and Elizabeth Buhe.
