Heather Bennett " Sidetrack (Snapshots, Outtakes, Polaroids 2001-2008)"
Stephan Stoyanov Gallery
This event has ended.
"While attempting to bring critical inquiry to a social issue, I saw the spectacle of what I was making. Not only in appropriating and reconstructing a coded familiar language but in my own struggle in recreating this very specific language and marking its critical component with my own presence. Acting not as a self but as a representation of the artist, a pithy placeholder to transform an object to a subject. My own image becomes a trope in service to a concept that demands renouncing any direct autobiographical information for a symbol. And the portrait of that symbol is the cliché of our communication, effectively masking my own story and becoming an anti-self portrait of sorts. The only clue to the actual self is the subject matter I am choosing to put under the white-hot light and deconstruct. With this clue the self cannot be completely extricated, which is exactly why the subject can emerge and take its critical place. These off hand, sidetrack, outtake images are a document of this raveled process, and lay bare its pertinent circularity. Quoting past feminists, I've tried to break down the pervasive language of advertising and female representation in contemporary society through a skewed reconstruction of that very language. Recording that reconstruction, dismantles it. The dialectical aspect of the entire enterprise is obvious when we see a colorfully wrought fiction deep within its studio environment, the ghost of the authoritative camera on the scene, captured by another camera, subjects torn out of their roles in infectious laughter or caught looking squarely into the interloping lens, the jeweled glow of a composed recital folded into a cocoon of utilitarian mechanics. Revealing the tools and mechanisms used to reprise these myths, hints at our inability to ply ourselves from the language even in the midst of breaking it down. While earnestly building a complex critique, I was simultaneously watching my own mechanization and fascinated by their implications. Aware of the constant contradiction, I moved forward and took notes. And it is this contradiction which gets acutely back to the heart of the critique; getting even closer to our actual experience of these images in the everyday, which is often clouded in a gray area of irreconcilability, desire and anger, love and hate. So, maybe this record, my notes from the side, lifts the veil not only of the artist, but of the whole undertaking and its purpose in the first place; the essence of these images being a hazy transparency which runs right back around to the beginning and shines the light brighter."
*The above excerpt is taken from the essay "Narcissus" by Heather Bennett included in the 240pg catalog, also called Sidetrack, which accompanies this exhibition.
[Image: Heather Bennett "Jeanne" (2005) 35mm snapshot from Sorority Girls, taken from "The Uncovered Works of Hanna Berman" series]
Media
Schedule
from September 12, 2010 to October 10, 2010
Opening Reception on 2010-09-12 from 18:00 to 20:00