Amy Bennett

Though Brooklyn-based painter Amy Bennett works in the most conventional fine-art medium, in her synthetic realist manner of painting, choice of subject matter, and freeze-frame treatment of dark, dramatic narratives, she draws deeply on popular filmic conventions, in particular sinister accounts of suburban disturbance. Like Little Children and The Truman Show, which traffic in a baleful, unreal vision of suburban life scrupulously crafted by careful directors, Bennett deftly manipulates her sets and characters to yield arresting, often disquieting oil-on-panel paintings. Much like the German photographer Thomas Demand, Bennett first creates three-dimensional tableaux. Working with railroad miniatures, landscaping supplies, and dollhouse lighting, for this show Bennett crafted a small suburban subdivision, the entirety of which is recorded from above in the largest canvas included here. This work—one of the least mysterious and least successful—may ground the other paintings in a specific constructed reality, but it is the setting, not the explanatory key, to Bennett’s world. The other thirteen paintings are a series of arrested, dislocated moments that lack causal effects and consequences and answer to no discernable logic. Bennett’s frankly existential paintings present a critical mass of accidental neighbors whose lives occasionally intersect. Most unsettling are tiny interior scenes (often as small as one by two inches) such as Against the Wall, 2006, which shows a rigid, sinewy male figure holding a limp, half-naked woman against a wall two or three feet off the ground. The viewer apprehends the painting as if peering into a window from two hundred yards away, unable to decode exactly what is happening, but palpably aware that that something is very wrong. Bennett’s paintings model the underbelly of a model life.