AMY BENNETT
AMY BENNETT NUCLEAR FAMILY
MILES M c E N E RY G A L L E RY
520 West 21st Street New York NY 10011
tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com
525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011
HIDDEN DRAMAS AND UNHISTORIC ACTS: AMY BENNETT’S NUCLEAR FAMILIES By Eleanor Heartney Novelists have always known that compelling narratives need not rely on death-defying adventures, scandalous intrigues or momentous events that change the lives of millions. Great literature is also spun from tiny movements of the soul: those eruptions of grace, wells of sorrow, slow drips of anxiety, comedic absurdities, and little epiphanies that make up our daily lives. It is these events that George Eliot referred to as the “unhistoric acts” that are responsible for much of what is good (and, she might have added, some of what is not so good) in the world. 3
Many of these unheralded dramas take place within the context of the family and are staged within the family home. Amy Bennett makes use of this fact in her deceptively simple tableaux of contemporary suburban life. Her paintings present riveting vignettes of family life in what appears to be a modest middle-class community in the northeastern United States. The setting has a comforting, mid-century feel: Abundant green trees shade boxy wooden houses wrapped with porches. These are set within patches of neatly trimmed lawns that butt up against each other. This world is the stuff of a certain version of the American Dream. Neighbors are close, but they are also separated by picket fences and hedges. Privacy is prized, but it is sometimes breached. Some paintings present representations of public spaces that speak of a fast-disappearing sense of community: There is a school, a small hospital, and a community swimming pool that offers an oasis of cool on a hot summer day. A winter scene depicts cars dispersing from a snow-covered parking lot after a community event. Another shows an opening in the nearby woods where hunters gather around a downed bear.
At first glance, the paintings seem to offer reassuring slices of life in a simpler time. But a closer look reveals hints of more unsettling realities. With a novelist’s acuity, Bennett explores the psychological tensions between the characters who inhabit these tidy homes. Whether offering a bird’s-eye view of the home’s exteriors or zooming inside, often by means of a dollhouse-like cross section, Bennett allows us to observe their private rituals, unrehearsed interactions, and secret lives. Her big theme here is family, and in particular the tensions of parenthood. We, as viewers, can observe the big and little events that transform lives. Bennett’s paintings chronicle childbirth itself, the introduction of a baby into a couple’s relationship, the delegation of the simple but necessary tasks of life (what the artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles calls “maintenance work”), multi-generational family gatherings, a parent’s attempt to carve out some time in the midst of a rambunctious family life, the marking (or not marking) of an important anniversary. 4
The glimpses we are afforded are always partial, although in some cases the continuity of setting suggests that we may be observing different moments in a connected narrative. The blue house whose double garage has been turned into a makeshift guest quarters in one painting reappears elsewhere in the aftermath of some disaster. Now the windows are boarded up, furniture is piled in the backyard, and yellow police tape wards off curious onlookers. Could this have anything to do with an interior scene where a young girl appears to be setting a room on fire? Another possible narrative unfolds in a bedroom. In Pin-up, a young mother struggles to undress as her baby clings to her breast. The two reappear in Animals. Here, the mother curls protectively in bed around her clinging baby. Her husband lies at a remove on his back, apparently disconnected from his wife and child. The body language is subtle but suggestive. Is this the beginning of an estrangement between the parents?
Other paintings take place in institutional settings. Often these are fraught with tension. Drill presents the interior of a classroom. Children and teacher sit clustered on the floor partially shielded from view by an upturned table. The painting suggests a sad continuity between generations. While baby boomers hid under their desks to prepare for a nuclear attack, today’s children must be trained to respond to the threat of an active shooter. A number of paintings feature hospital or clinic settings. Delivery gives us a bird’s-eye view of a woman giving birth. What once was a private event in a domestic setting is now fully institutionalized: The woman in the center of the grouping is hooked up to machines, surrounded by hospital personnel, and almost lost in the web of tubes and apparatuses. In New Mother, we see a woman (perhaps the same one?) and her baby waiting on the curb outside the hospital to be taken home. Her posture is at once protective and apprehensive. Emergency suggests that such anxiety is simply a part of motherhood. Here, a woman holds an older child who seems to be flailing in pain as they sit in the hospital waiting room. Part of the marvel of these diminutive worlds is Bennett’s mastery of light. She contrasts the cold fluorescent illumination of the hospital waiting room with the warm greenish light seeping into a sun-drenched bedroom. She captures the fading glow of the late afternoon sun, the sharp radiance of early morning, and the mysterious mix of moonlight and shadow that bathe the world in the middle of the night. Lying behind these effects is a painstaking process of model building that allows her to manipulate light sources and accurately gauge how the light will fall. Her models are created from cardboard, wood, foam, wire, glue, paint, and plastic at HO (model railway) scale and populated with trees and figures adapted from model railroad materials. Though viewers will never see them, the models allow Bennett to envision the tableaux she will paint. She is able to move around them, explore different perspectives, rearrange figures and props, and even see how settings alter with the change of seasons or the alternation of day and night.
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Thus, even though the narratives spring from her imagination, the paintings are also painted from “life.” This gives them an unsettling kind of realism—simultaneously artificial and naturalistic. Her process creates a kind of remove. Furniture, for instance, is at once reassuringly solid and oddly generic, while figures never quite become fully individuated. Most of the paintings in this series are small, adding to a sense of intimacy. Viewers become voyeurs forced to peer closely to make out telling details. We feel a bit like invaders, breaking through the privacy of these very personal moments.
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All of this contributes to an out-of-time quality that stresses the universality of the emotional situations these works evoke. Though there are concessions to the contemporary world—late model cars, an occasional laptop computer, and, within the medical buildings, state-of-the-art medical equipment—in many ways the paintings suggest an idealized version of American life that is reminiscent of early television. The stories that are narrated here could have played out at any time in the last fifty years. They are light years away from the urban congestion, inescapable 24/7 surveillance, and relentless digital connection that have become such a pervasive aspect of twenty-first century life. Bennett is the mother of two young children. She grew up in central Maine, and after completing her studies at the University of Hartford in Connecticut and then at the New York Academy of Art in New York City, she lived as an artist in New York for fourteen years. Six years ago, she and her family settled in Cold Spring, a small town in the Hudson Valley. Though her paintings are not strictly autobiographical, they are drawn from the textures of her life before and after New York City. Her earlier series, Neighbors, from 2006 presents the interconnected lives of people living in a suburban subdivision and is based on her life in Maine. Small Changes, created from 2014–16, is inspired by Cold Spring and its environs. This series takes a longer “drone view” of a landscape
changing from farmland to town. The current series is titled Nuclear Family—a name that carries a double meaning. On one hand, it refers to the familial unit that has, since the mid-twentieth century, been considered the basic building block of society. But it also contains a note of threat, nuclear terrors being a shorthand designation for all of the fears, uncontrollable energies, and dark forebodings of our age. In recent decades, the anxieties and expectations that surround family life have been scrutinized and politicized to a degree that may be unprecedented. Debates over immigration, education, social media, and childcare roil society. Parents fear doing damage to their children, and they also fear the damage being done to the children by society. The theme of family is a recurring subject of theatrical, Hollywood, and television productions. Yet, curiously, it has often seemed off limits to contemporary artists. Fears of succumbing to nostalgia or sentimentality appear to deter artists from engaging with this most central aspect of our experience. The novelist David Lodge might be speaking as well of visual art when he says, “Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children; life’s the other way around.” Bennett takes up the challenge implied by this statement. Her paintings remind us that the family is at once the most basic and the most precarious aspect of our existence. In wrestling with the dilemmas and tensions that surround family life, Bennett offers a reminder of the hopes, fears, dilemmas, joys, and dreams that make us human.
Eleanor Heartney is an art writer and contributing editor to Artpress and Art in America.
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Bear Hunt, 2017
Oil on panel 12 x 9 inches 30.5 x 22.9 cm
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A Light Around Your Head, 2017 Oil on panel 18 x 24 inches 45.7 x 61 cm
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Pin-up, 2018
Oil on panel 2 3/4 x 6 1/2 inches 7 x 16.5 cm
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Animals, 2018 Oil on panel 3 1/2 x 6 inches 8.9 x 15.2 cm
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Drills - Bathroom, 2018
Oil on panel 6 1/2 x 4 3/4 inches 16.5 x 12.1 cm
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Crashing, 2018 Oil on panel 12 x 16 inches 30.5 x 40.6 cm
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Claims, 2018 Oil on panel 8 x 10 inches 20.3 x 25.4 cm
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Rubber Gloves, 2018
Oil on panel 4 x 5 inches 10.2 x 12.7 cm
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Fashion Show, 2018
Oil on panel 3 1/2 x 10 inches 8.9 x 25.4 cm
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Sunday Morning, 2018 Oil on panel 9 x 3 3/4 inches 22.9 x 9.5 cm
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Anniversary, 2018 Oil on panel 10 x 14 inches 25.4 x 35.6 cm
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Doghouse, 2018 Oil on panel 14 x 18 inches 35.6 x 45.7 cm
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Gawker, 2018 Oil on panel 18 x 13 inches 45.7 x 33 cm
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In The Throes, 2018
Oil on panel 4 x 4 inches 10.2 x 10.2 cm
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Problem Child, 2018
Oil on panel 2 3/4 x 4 1/2 inches 7 x 11.4 cm
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New Mother, 2018 Oil on panel 6 x 9 inches 15.2 x 22.9 cm
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Drills, 2018 Oil on panel 6 1/2 x 14 inches 16.5 x 35.6 cm
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Mother, Father, 2018 Oil on panel 4 x 9 inches 10.2 x 22.9 cm
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Floating Lessons, 2018 Oil on panel 22 x 22 inches 55.9 x 55.9 cm
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Groom, 2019
Oil on panel 10 x 12 1/2 inches 25.4 x 31.8 cm
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Witch, 2019
Oil on panel 3 3/4 x 5 1/4 inches 9.5 x 13.3 cm
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Delivery, 2019 Oil on panel 5 x 7 1/2 inches 12.7 x 19.1 cm
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Emergency, 2019
Oil on panel 4 1/2 x 11 inches 11.4 x 27.9 cm
AMY BENNETT Born in Portland, ME in 1977 Lives and works in Cold Spring, NY
EDUCATION 2002 MFA, New York Academy of Art, New York, NY 1999 BFA, University of Hartford, Hartford, CT
2009 “Vacationland,” Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo, Japan “Out in the Open – Monotypes,” Galleri Magnus Karlsson, Stockholm, Sweden “At the Lake,” Richard Heller Gallery, Santa Monica, CA 2007 “Buried,” Galleri Magnus Karlsson, Stockholm, Sweden “Neighbors,” Richard Heller Gallery, Santa Monica, CA 2005 “Stories,” Linda Warren Gallery, Chicago, IL
GROUP EXHIBITIONS SOLO EXHIBITIONS
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2019 Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY “Amy Bennett: Nuclear Family,” Brattleboro Museum & Art Center, Brattleboro, VT 2016 “Small Changes Every Day,” Richard Heller Gallery, Santa Monica, CA “Time Speeds Up,” Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, New York, NY 2013 “Thin-Skinned,” Richard Heller Gallery at Volta, New York, NY 2011 “Sore Spots,” Galleri Magnus Karlsson, Stockholm, Sweden “Heydays,” Permanent Mosaic Installation, 86th Street Station, New York, NY
2018 “Downsized: Small-Scale Sculpture by Contemporary Artists,” The Bruce Museum, Greenwich, CT 2017 “Really?” (curated by Beth Rudin DeWoody), Wilding Cran Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “Ethics of Depiction: Landscape, Still Life, Human,” Oakland University Art Gallery, Rochester, MI 2016 “Water|Bodies,” Southampton Art Center, Southampton, NY “20th Anniversary Show,” Smack Mellon, New York, NY 2015 “Disturbing Innocence” (curated by Eric Fischl), The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY “Stirring Still,” LeRoy Neiman Gallery, Columbia University, New York, NY “Seven Deadly Sins: Lust,” HVCCA: Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Peekskill, NY
2013 “Time Waits for Us,” Galleri Magnus Karlsson, Stockholm, Sweden “Faux Life,” Richard Heller Gallery, Los Angeles, CA 2012 “XS: Extra Small,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY “Otherworldly,” MUba Eugène-Leroy, Tourcoing, France 2011 “Otherworldly: Optical Delusions & Small Realities,” Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY “Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts,” American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY “Exhibition of Work by Newly Elected Members and Recipients of Honors and Awards,” American Academy of Arts & Letters, New York, NY 2010 “Today is Yesterday Tomorrow,” Galleri Magnus Karlsson, Stockholm, Sweden “Landscape and Solitude,” Kumukumu Gallery, New York, NY 2007 “Size Matters: XS,” HVCCA: Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Peekskill, NY 2005 “Visitors from the East,” Billy Shire Fine Art, Los Angeles, CA “The Gallery,” Galleri Magnus Karlsson, Stockholm, Sweden “Something is Somewhere,” Monya Rowe Gallery, New York, NY 2004 “Points of Muse,” Linda Warren Gallery, Chicago, IL 2003 “Public Domain,” Linda Warren Gallery, Chicago, IL “Space Invaders,” Fish Tank Gallery, New York, NY
AWARDS AND RESIDENCIES 2015 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (Fine Arts) Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant 2011 Rosenthal Family Foundation Award in Painting American Academy of Arts & Letters Purchase Award 2010 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship Marie Walsh Sharpe Studio Program 2006 New York Foundation for the Arts/Deutsche Bank Fellowship Smack Mellon Studio Program 2004 Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant 2003 Prince of Wales Scholarship to Normandy, France Research Fellowship, The New York Academy of Art 1999 Felicia C. Miller Award for Artistic Excellence Barbara Podorowsky Memorial Award for Excellence in Painting
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Published on the occasion of the exhibition
AMY BENNETT NUCLEAR FAMILY 11 July – 16 August 2019 Miles McEnery Gallery 520 West 21st Street New York NY 10011 tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com Publication © 2019 Miles McEnery Gallery All rights reserved Essay © 2019 Eleanor Heartney
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Photography by Christopher Burke Studio, New York, NY Color separations by Echelon, Santa Monica, CA Catalogue layout by McCall Associates, New York, NY ISBN: 978-1-949327-15-1 Cover: Groom, (detail), 2019
MILES M c E N E RY G A L L E RY