Heather Benjamin
"Death of a Tail"
December 15, 2017 - January 12, 2018
Dress Shop Gallery
322 Troutman Street
Brooklyn, New York
“Death of a Tail” marks a departure for Benjamin. Having spent years with her practice firmly rooted in DIY zine and comics culture, her drawings have typically been made with the intent of mass reproduction, through photocopying and screen printing. With this body of work, Benjamin moves in a new direction, creating works whose primary motivations are not exclusively to be reproduced and reprinted as their final form, but are instead made to be viewed as singular and precious objects. For the artist, this new intention opens up infinite possibilities to experiment with scale, color, and medium, in ways she had not yet attempted. Benjamin here shows both works on paper and on canvas, the latter of which is a first for her. The works range from the most minuscule of talismans to larger than life representations of the female creatures that, until now, have lived only in the pages of her artist’s books and foldout zines for which she became known over the last several years.
The subjects of this exhibition are a logical continuation of the larger narrative of Benjamin’s body of work - she explores, through her depictions of half woman, half animal beings in various states of rapture, the female human experience, as she knows it. Benjamin muses on intimacy, sexuality, self-perception, body dysmorphia, and trauma through her avatars. Her work is diaristic, approaching her subjects through the lens of her own personal experience; each work can easily feel like a self portrait. Her women are simultaneously self-assured and crumbled, standing defiantly on their own two hairy legs, yet seeking the shoulder of an empathetic viewer to cry on. Benjamin uses her work to sort through her own trauma and self-analysis, and seeks to give faces, bodies, and narratives to the different facets of her own womanhood. Through that excavation, she reaches for more universal ideas and truths about the relationships people have to each other and to themselves, hoping to guide herself through the abjections and frustrations of her womanhood towards a greater sense of self acceptance and actualization.
