Bruno David Projects: Thursday, 5 March 2015
HEATHER BENNETT: Four Stories
March 5 – April 11, 2015
Opening Reception: Thursday, March 5, 2015 6 to 9 pm
Four Stories is composed of what seems to be a few vignettes, each told through a series of photographs. The image 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. The artist employs storytelling as a tool, claiming the use of pathos, parody, dark humor, desire, all as indicators of a story that doesn’t really exist but to outline the subject, a subject traditionally positioned as an object. The revelation of the embodied female subject is achieved through a kind of denial.
Putting herself in these sexualized stereotypes, Heather Bennett questions the credulity of our simple clichés which are segregated from connection and consideration. The artist’s own image is a structural quotation of past feminist artworks while functioning as another tactic to slyly highlight the subject. She acts not as a self but as a representation of the artist which marks the critical component of the work. Her presence doesn’t quite belong, an interloper in a scene we thought we understood. The women in her photographs inhabit ordinary roles, remnants of a time, yet they faintly resist. There is an individuality warped by boundary, seeping through our myopic categorization. That familiar language fails to sum them up. In defiance of their limited place, they subtly direct the scene; wriggling under mythical constraints, veiling truth, but still asking us to believe them.
Hours: Wednesday & Saturday Noon to 5:00 pm. Also open by private appointment.
March 5 – April 11, 2015
Opening Reception: Thursday, March 5, 2015 6 to 9 pm
Four Stories is composed of what seems to be a few vignettes, each told through a series of photographs. The image 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. The artist employs storytelling as a tool, claiming the use of pathos, parody, dark humor, desire, all as indicators of a story that doesn’t really exist but to outline the subject, a subject traditionally positioned as an object. The revelation of the embodied female subject is achieved through a kind of denial.
Putting herself in these sexualized stereotypes, Heather Bennett questions the credulity of our simple clichés which are segregated from connection and consideration. The artist’s own image is a structural quotation of past feminist artworks while functioning as another tactic to slyly highlight the subject. She acts not as a self but as a representation of the artist which marks the critical component of the work. Her presence doesn’t quite belong, an interloper in a scene we thought we understood. The women in her photographs inhabit ordinary roles, remnants of a time, yet they faintly resist. There is an individuality warped by boundary, seeping through our myopic categorization. That familiar language fails to sum them up. In defiance of their limited place, they subtly direct the scene; wriggling under mythical constraints, veiling truth, but still asking us to believe them.
Hours: Wednesday & Saturday Noon to 5:00 pm. Also open by private appointment.
BRUNO DAVID PROJECTS
1245 South Vandeventer Avenue
Saint Louis, MO 63110 USA
posted by Bill Barrett at 12:21 PM
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