Heather Bennett. Four Stories

Stephan Stoyanov Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of a solo exhibition by Heather Bennett. This will be the artist’s fifth show in the gallery.

Four Stories is composed of what seems to be a few vignettes, each told through a series of photographs. The structure suggests familiar narrative tropes where there are actually only symbols. Symbols which form an assumed arrangement, a situation that is easily read and fitted into our reality of images, past and present. Upon closer inspection, however, the story is full of holes. What at first seems obvious, is only hinted and does not carry through. The settings have an artificiality, the time period is hazy and inconsistent and the emotional import is unclear. Something is amiss, slightly outside of the lines. Where does the story begin and the context end?

The women in these photographs inhabit ordinary roles, remnants of a time, yet they faintly resist. The familiar commercialized sexuality of these characters who are not youthful and light is out of place. That familiar language fails to sum them up. Almost in shadow, they defy their limited place because they subtly direct the scene, barely contain the situation and scarcely tweak their myth. There is an individuality warped by boundary, seeping through our traditionally myopic categorization. Are these women liars or are they all holding some bit of truth? Their choice seems imminent. Putting herself in these sexualized stereotypes, Heather Bennett questions the credulity of our simple clichés which are segregated from connection and consideration. Her presence doesn’t quite belong, an interloper in a scene we thought we understood. She gives us incongruity where there should be comfort, comfort and a reassuring glance.

Heather Bennett gained her BA and BFA at Washington University, St. Louis, MO, and received her MFA at Hunter College, New York. Her work was shown at numerous solo and group exhibitions, at the institutions such as Contemporary Arts Center, Syracuse, NY; Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, DE; Eva Hober Gallery, Paris, France; Graffit Gallery, Varna, Bulgaria; FIAC Contemporary Art Fair, Paris, France; University of Alabama at Birmingham, AL; Forum for Contemporary Art, St. Louis, MO; LOOP Contemporary Art Fair, Barcelona, Spain; and Gallerie S.E., Bergen, Norway, among others. She is the recipient of The Somerville Art Prize, New York (2002); William Graff Travel Abroad Scholarship, Hunter College, MFA (2000), and Marsha Hertzman Blasingame Award for Printmaking (1994). Bennett’s work has been the subject of numerous reviews and art publications, such as Artnet, Art Review Magazine, Art on Paper Magazine, ArtPapers, The New York Times, and Time Out New York. Currently, Bennett is Louis D. Beaumont Artist in Residence at Washington University, St. Louis, MO.

Stephan Stoyanov Gallery
29 Orchard Street
New York (NY) 10002 United States
Tel. +1 (212) 3434240
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www.stephanstoyanov.com

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Sunday from 12pm to 6pm

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