Olympia is happy to current New Strangeness Bloom, Heather Benjamin’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Benjamin’s work examine the hyper-vulnerable experiences of current in a feminine physique. Constructing on her formal printmaking background and a prolific, two-decade-long zinemaking apply, her autodidactic work emerge as self-portraits.
By means of a diaristic lens, Benjamin’s figures—half goddess, half flawed protagonist—manifest religious transformation. These figures navigate imagined desert landscapes, alive with unnameable flora shimmering below electrical skies. Each literal and symbolic, these “unusual blooms” embody perseverance and renewal amidst psychic and bodily terrains which might be barren, parched, and alien.
Benjamin’s method to portray nods to Surrealist modes of narration and the idiosyncrasies of outsider artwork. Motifs comparable to impassioned {couples} floating in clouds or rising from extraterrestrial blooms evoke dream states, recollections, and inside monologues. Phrases scrawled throughout cowboy hats and bootstraps learn like fleeting, nonlinear poems.
In New Strangeness Bloom, Benjamin explores sexuality, gender, trauma, and self-perception by means of intricate, labyrinthine mark-making, maximalist palettes, and a developed private symbology. Damaged mirrors, useless cockroaches, nail-polished claws, and butterflies mix with retro-futurist Americana, warping, refracting, and reimagining mythologies of femininity.
The exhibition’s title is drawn from Diane di Prima’s Loba, a seminal feminist epic that, like Benjamin’s work, conjures self-actualization by means of mystic meditations on womanhood.
These psychological landscapes, inhabited by curious deities, unfold as mysterious wastelands the place new myths take root. Just like the mutant flowers that blossom in a parched desert, Benjamin’s figures endure, inhabiting a world the place development, need, and survival are inextricably intertwined.
