Amy Bennett

These paintings by Amy Bennett from her series Neighbors look like diorama. Of course they do, she first builds miniature 3D models and then paints them.

Working with common themes such as transition, aging, isolation, and loss, she is interested in the fragility of relationships and the awkwardness of a group of people trying to coexist and relate to one another. To that end she creates miniature 3D models to serve as evolving still lifes from which she paints detailed narrative paintings. Currently, she is creating a series from a lakefront diorama. The relentless fecundity of nature depicted against a painted sky backdrop is her staging ground for evolving fictions that are reflected in a lake of resin.

The paintings are glimpses of a scene or fragments of a narrative. Similar to a memory, they are fictional constructions of significant moments. She is interested in storytelling over time through repeated depictions of the same house or car or person, seasonal changes, and shifting vantage points. Like the disturbing difficulty of trying to put rolls of film in order several years after the pictures have been taken, she hopes the collective images suggest a known past that is just beyond reach. One of my challenges is to invite the viewer to form his or her own connection and narrative so that he may empathize with the occupants’ seemingly mundane existence.

For her previous project she contsructed a fictional model neighborhood. She considered who lived in each home, their family dramas, and the way their private lives might spill into view of their neighbors. The model became a stage on which to develop the psychological implications of belonging to a particular family, with all of its dramas, struggles and familiar routines. She thought: this tree will be taken down after an old man crashes into it; a father will transform this lawn into an ice skating rink; this house will be abandoned after its residents are scandalized on the evening news. As she transitioned her model into winter, snowbanks of increasing depth seemed to fortify a sense of isolation and quietness. The paintings portray both the magical and suffocating potential of snow, wonder at its stark beauty and hopelessness that spring might never come.