Amy Bennett Biography

Based in the Hudson Valley of New York State, Bennett creates artworks that are products of a painstaking two-stage process. The artist begins by creating scale models and dioramas of fictional places (landscapes and interior) using cardboard, wood, Styrofoam, plastic, string, paint, glue, and model railroad miniatures. She progressively builds up and populates these imagined environments inspired by rural and suburban upstate New York with figures acting out local history and snippets of narratives.

Parallels to Bennett's practice can be found in the similarly model-based practices of photographers James Casebere, Thomas Demand, and Laurie Simmonds, or painters like Malcolm Morley. With total control over lighting, composition, and vantage points, Bennett turns these suburban scenes of life and intrigue into paintings. High-angled perspectives often resembling a bird's-eye perspective or view from a low-flying aircraft, exaggerated distances from the subjects, and consciously preserved inconsistencies of scale contribute to an uneasy sense of unnaturalness or inauthenticity. While representing a fictional miniature world, the artist's works reflect life in upstate New York, conveying a sense of isolation within populated neighbourhoods.

For her series of monotypes and paintings exhibited at Richard Heller Gallery in 2016, Bennett created a rural landscape bit by bit, adding fences, property lines, fields, and monopoly-sized buildings (totalling 450 by the end) to make a bustling town. Documented over different stages of the town's growth, the approach explores changing relationships to the environment over time and the American dream of taming nature.

Some of Bennett's paintings are more explicitly narrative. They tell fragments of human stories up to and including—as in the case of artworks such as Paying Respects (2006)—death, in fictive environments. Occasionally they refer to domestic violence, as in Against the Wall (2006), which shows a man pressing a young woman against a wall, holding her high above the floor.

Bennett's series of family scenes—'Nuclear Family' (2019)—carries the sense of fleeting voyeurism seen in the paintings of fellow New Yorker Edward Hopper (1882–1967). Intimate moments between figures seen at a distance are frozen in time like glimpses of other lives viewed through a window. The quietness of the artist's interiors and landscapes has a sinister undercurrent lurking in the fine details of these snapshots of suburban, small-town life.

Since graduating with a BFA from the University of Hartford (1999) followed by an MFA from the New York Academy of Art (2002), Bennett has been the recipient of multiple prestigious fellowships and scholarships. These include the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2015), the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship (2010), and the Prince of Wales Scholarship to Normandy (2003).

Bennett's paintings have been exhibited in many galleries across the United States, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. In 2011 she undertook a public commission for a mosaic mural in a New York subway station.

Michael Irwin | Ocula | 2019