Leigh Behnke “Time Travelers and Ghost Ships”

SVA Flatiron Gallery

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BFA Visual & Critical Studies (BFA VCS) and the Flatiron Project Space annually celebrate a faculty member who has made a substantial contribution to the School of Visual Arts and its students. This year BFA VCS presents Time Travelers and Ghost Ships, recent paintings by Leigh Behnke, as its first exhibition of the 2023-2024 academic year.

Leigh Behnke is a faculty member in both the BFA Fine Arts and Honors departments at SVA and has worked with and mentored many students from BFA Visual & Critical Studies. Her work has been exhibited extensively, including at the MEAM in Barcelona, the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Neuberger Museum and the National Academy of Design. Behnke received ED Foundation Grants in both 1999 and 2000 and was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2013. The artist has prepared the following statement about the paintings exhibited in Time Travelers and Ghost Ships:

“I have always been interested in the formal properties that make up an image, and how combining images could re-contextualize the way we perceive them. My work involves combining this iconography to alter properties of a representation that may extend or enhance its immediate identification.

My current work involves the use of cultural objects which for me serve as repositories of myths that connect us to the past. These are the sites of the cultural iconography that binds inherited norms to our present situation. We are in turbulent times, and we are adrift.

Most of the objects used in these paintings are from museums. The Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna is the source for the golden ship, and the sculptural figures are from the Metropolitan Museum. For me, they are ‘time travelers,’ confronting an era unlike their own. They are part of a series with the working title ‘Your History Is Your Future’.”