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COWGIRL DENTAL FLOSS | Heather Benjamin

COWGIRL DENTAL FLOSS | Heather Benjamin
COWGIRL DENTAL FLOSS | Heather Benjamin
COWGIRL DENTAL FLOSS | Heather Benjamin
COWGIRL DENTAL FLOSS | Heather Benjamin
COWGIRL DENTAL FLOSS | Heather Benjamin
COWGIRL DENTAL FLOSS | Heather Benjamin
COWGIRL DENTAL FLOSS | Heather Benjamin
COWGIRL DENTAL FLOSS | Heather Benjamin
COWGIRL DENTAL FLOSS | Heather Benjamin
COWGIRL DENTAL FLOSS | Heather Benjamin
COWGIRL DENTAL FLOSS | Heather Benjamin
COWGIRL DENTAL FLOSS | Heather Benjamin

COWGIRL DENTAL FLOSS | Heather Benjamin

March 9 – April 21, 2019

Artists Reception: March 9th, 7–9 PM

These Days is pleased to present Cowgirl Dental Floss, a solo exhibition of new works by Heather Benjamin.

Benjamin’s newest body of work begins the next chapter in her continuing diaristic mythology - an unrestrained episodic narrative which has spanned the artist’s career thus far, always starring an evolving protagonist, acting as an avatar for Benjamin herself. Embracing the impetus to explicitly use the personal in art, her characters play out the multiple facets of the artist’s psyche as she moves through the different phases of womanhood and explores her trauma. This most recent installment stars an untamed cowgirl on the run from those who have restrained her, and from past versions of herself.

The central series of paintings, How To Repulse a Demon I - XII, portray a winged cowgirl in various poses surrounded by a checker-tiled environment. Titled after a line from Roland Barthes 1977 book A Lover’s Discourse, Benjamin investigates the phenomena of love and self-actualization, carefully writing her personal experiences within each rose, heart, and vagina she paints.

Benjamin shows ceramic works alongside her paintings for the first time in Cowgirl Dental Floss, providing evidence that her protagonist can step through the veil into the 3-dimensional realm. Her ceramic sheriff's badges are sculpted references to the stars worn on the hats of the figures within her paintings. Choosing the form of the star as guide, adornment, and naming device, the ceramics playfully encourage a closer viewing of the more subtle details of Benjamin’s paintings by bringing artifacts from the parallel universe of her characters into our world for the first time.

Known widely for her zines and self-published books of drawings, Benjamin’s new body of work pays homage to, as well expands upon, her DIY roots. Print material, accessible to the masses and ephemeral by nature, opens an in-depth conversation around the complexities of Benjamin’s work. Paper, easily written off as a “lesser” material due to its impermanence, is celebrated here for both its instability and fragility. A drawing on a sheet of sun-aged newsprint, or a photocopied image on delicate rag paper, becomes less a substrate and more a protagonist, as our first concern might be that the drawing will fall apart.

The lone cowgirl navigates her psychedelic emotional landscape, bursting with raw emotion, learning of her own power and wielding it both tenderly and triumphantly in her journey to evolve to her next form. She works to make sense of her damages, lick her wounds and extract beauty from her dilemmas. The essence of Cowgirl Dental Floss is a story of energy and empowerment as much as one of terror and dysphoria, for there is no progression without discomfort.

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She said as she was breaking all her mirrors, “I saw my likeness in the flower, the rings of Saturn, the butterfly.”

            I’m thinking, Does the rose really feel protected by its thorns? She grows her nails out and files them into points so that she can scratch her new name into her forehead, I love to be alone. She ties her hair into messages that outline a language only dogs can read. She’s found a new way of being, by wearing a kind of existence on her feet like platform-studded shoes with spurs and growing her pubes into little rows that frame her pussy.

            “I would think demons might enjoy being repulsed,” she laughs as she bends over to pick up her hat. I’m having a hard time restraining myself. Cowgirls are one of my weaknesses. She cinches her belt a couple holes tighter around her waist, which makes one of her boobs pop out.

            “Oh well, I’m not wearing pants anyways,” she shrugs. “Wanna dance?”

            “ I would love to, but demons dance alone.”

                                                                                                   -Brook Hsu

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Heather Benjamin (b. 1989, Tarrytown, New York) lives and works in New York City. She graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2016 with a BFA in Printmaking. Benjamin began self-publishing zines and artist books of her drawings in 2008. Since then, she has maintained her bookmaking and self-publishing practices while simultaneously branching out into making larger scale drawings and paintings, as well as animating, working with ceramics and textiles, and curating. All of her work is firmly rooted in DIY/punk ethics and culture and feminist ideas. She has exhibited her work extensively, including at Miami Art Basel, SPRING/BREAK, Mana Contemporary, Invisible Exports, Muddguts, Andrew Edlin, and more. Cowgirl Dental Floss is Benjamin's first solo exhibition in Los Angeles.

 

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