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
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Keri Robertson and Bruno David are pleased to present a new exhibition of recent photographs by Heather Bennett. 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.
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Images: Heather Bennett: Crush, 2011, 42 x 63 inches, digital print on Somerset Velvet, (edition of 3); Heather Bennett: On the Road, 2013, (diptych) 28 x 42 inches each, digital print on premium luster, (edition of 3). © 2015 Bruno David Gallery and Bruno David Projects. All International Rights Reserved. Works of individual artists remain the intellectual property and are copyrighted by their respective authors. No unauthorized reproduction, all rights reserved. Gallery approval must be granted prior to reproduction.

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