1 Annotated Bibliography Maura Bennett

Bennett, Maura. Rooted. February 12, 2018. BISIA 240 A Sculpting the Human Form. Winter 2018. Project 2.

Rooted seeks to take the complex reflections on the body as a medium of self-expression, identity, silence, tension, and survival by Louise Bourgeois and Marina Abramovic and apply them to Bennett’s own experiences with extreme residential mobility. She cites her unstable childhood as the inspiration for this piece, considering the form of the human foot as one that holds cultural and emotional experiences as well as physically grounds the person. This piece is a clay ceramic sculpture based on a cast of the artist’s own foot and juxtaposed with found roots and branches that create a theatrical height, bursting, wrapping, and interacting with the mass of the foot.

I chose this piece because again it pushed me to try things with my art that I would never have considered. In this piece I played around unconventional and difficult to manipulate materials which I think brought my finished sculpture much more visual and conceptual interest. It also opened me up to considering medium in a way that was new for me. Previously I would love to experiment with new or different materials but this project was a turning point for me in the consideration of the significance of this materials as well as the possibilities and limitations they gave my work. When presenting this piece I also learned a lot about how to describe it as a three dimensional art object and refer to its form, volume, mass, and texture more critically.

Bennett, Maura. Vascular. March 2018. BISIA 240 A Sculpting the Human Form. Winter 2018. Final.

Vascular uses the aesthetics of the inorganic to translate the forms and feelings of the organic human heart. Bennett was inspired by the work of Antoni, her meticulous and careful use of found materials to weave together a rope infused with culture and experience in the piece Moor sparked the idea for this piece. Bennett aimed to take the soft, caring, familiar practice of knitting and reorient it with new materials. She chose clear vinyl tubing for its transparent quality, giving the piece a feeling of the medical, the visceral, the hollow. It also lets through the light, the color, the air which allows the heart the opportunity to be seen. Vascular works with themes of family, transparency, connection, surrealism, emotion, mental health, home, and identity.

I chose this piece because it was the sculpture that I felt truly inspired me to take more risks with my work and be comfortable experimenting outside of the medium that I felt comfortable and safe in. It taught be that even after my undergraduate experience I can grow as an artist and try new and difficult strategies and still succeed.

Bennett, Maura. Between Strangers. May 23-25 2017. BISIA 383 A Global Agitation. Spring 2017. Alive: Performance Art Festival.

Bennett worked to curate and create the four durational participatory installations Between Strangers for the Alive Performance Art Festival 2017. Showcasing the aesthetics of the past, the four installations located around the University of Washington Bothell campus invited the public, students and faculty alike, to participate in a durational performance art piece. These four installations gave participants the opportunity to unburden themselves. Exploring themes including human connectivity and a departure from the apathy and social phobia that is commonly felt between strangers, this piece aimed to maximize community engagement in an effort to activate the campus and disrupt daily routine. The installations included The Couch, The Blackboard, The Confessional, and The Typewriter.

I chose this piece because it was one of my first introductions to curating and is one of the largest pieces I have ever been responsible for. The responses and interaction that came out of these installations was life changing to witness and I am very proud of the mass amount of work I put in to this piece. It is also another example of a departure from my favorite medium that was well received.

Bennett, Maura. Urban Disguise. April 30, 2017. BISIA 483 A Curatorial Studies: Rituals for Exhibiting Art. Spring 2017. INCA

Urban Disguise is a contemporary experimental exhibition curated by Maura Bennett for the Institute for New Connotative Action. The show featured six local artists who created or submitted works for the space around the conceptual interpretation of masks. The significance of this show in the Seattle art scene is large as an artist-curated exhibition in an artist-run gallery featuring small-name local artists. Aesthetically Bennett juxtaposed the colorful, vibrant, chaotic pieces with a stark, crisp exhibition space. Bennett featured an experimental work of her own, Looking Glass, which was custom made for the gallery space; in which she created a modern stained-glass effect by painting with enamel on a found glass panel. She was inspired by the physical and conceptual parallels between glass as a medium and masks.

I chose this piece because not only did I curate another entire exhibition essentially alone, but this was in a downtown art gallery, validating it even a step further. I loved working in the space, I loved creating my painting for the exhibit, and curating in this way was an interesting contrast to the performance art festival because of the amount of leadership I had to exhibit and arranging with so many other “team members” from the artists I contacted to the marketing representatives. It was an extremely valuable opportunity in my undergraduate experience and I learned the most from it.

Bennett, Maura. Wave. March 5, 2017. BISIA 383 A Ephemeral Art. Winter 2017. Land Art.

Inspired by the work of Andy Goldsworthy and Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, Maura Bennett created this extraordinary piece that combines the performance of public art with the organic shapes and materials traditionally found in Land Art. Bennett simply used sand, dyed a bright blue, as well as shells found and collected from the location to make this huge, swirling, spiraling, ephemeral piece. The idea of the temporary and impermanent has always been something fascinating and romantic to Bennett, using her series of ephemeral pieces to meditate within that concept. The performance, a sort of dance, to create the piece is as much part of the work as the sand, both the work and the artist are gone by the next sunrise.

I chose this piece because my ephemeral art course was one that I took during my first year (of 2) at UW and it was life changing for me. I was introduced to so many unique art-historical movements like Dada, and Happenings, and Land Art, and Instructional art, and Gutai. While this course for others was easy, or put them outside of their comfort zone in a seemingly embarrassing way, this was the first course I took at UW that really inspired me. I loved making work and trying new techniques in this course and its tragic the professor is not with the school anymore.

Bennett, Maura. Trace & Eleanore. March 2018. BISIA 135 A Acrylic Painting. Winter 2018. Project 2.

Inspired by the work of Kehinde Wiley, Bennett set out to create a series of paintings dealing with the concept of identity and interdependence. Throughout humans’ lives their identity and understanding of the world develops through the people around them and the experiences they share. Using realistic portraiture techniques juxtaposed by brightly colored, semi-abstracted floral backgrounds, Bennett’s series aims to pay homage to the people in her life that help to form her identity and influence and inspire her every day. The use of bold brush strokes and saturated color give the paintings a dynamic flow and balanced composition that keep the eye moving around the surface. These large portraits are partially incomplete yet carry an air of grandiose beauty.

I chose this series because it was a huge moment of accomplishment for me. I avoid acrylic paint like the plague after my training in oil painting and so when I took this course for easy studio access I didn’t realize the school doesn’t allow oil painting due to improper facilities (of course). So I reluctantly returned to a medium I have always battled and I was very surprised by what I could achieve with the medium now, as well as the quality of work I could produce in a tiny amount of time. These portraits were done in only a day each when I normally would have to commit multiple weeks of work for one piece. I challenged myself here and the pieces are very sentimental to me, though I still want to finish at least another layer or two and varnish them.

Bennett, Maura. Love Letter. November 2016. BISIA 383 B Publishing Arts.Autumn 2016. InDesign Assignment.

Prompted with only the words Love and Rebellion, Bennett designed this six page, experimental art-zine inspired spread. The foundation of each page is a scan of hand written love letters. Stacked tightly on top of those are letters themselves. The use of a bold, black traditional serif font is a love letter to typography in and of itself. Following that, the design lends itself to illegibility; not only deceiving the viewer into an illiteracy, an inability to make sense of the page they are seeing, also obscuring the very base that the words appear on. The spread is the epitome of confusion, of an inability to communicate, of misunderstanding, which is so common in love, relationships and rebellion. Not to mention that the spread breaks every rule of what constitutes “good design”. Bennett uses this complex conceptual piece to make a societal statement on what art is.

I chose this piece because I have such a strong personal distaste for graphic design and digital art, that I wanted to show the variety of my portfolio. I made this piece in my first class of my first quarter, with another professor that is also no longer with the school. It was extremely challenging for me and I tried to push concept as far as I could and I’m still somewhat proud of this piece.

Bennett, Maura. Blue Ice. March 6, 2017. BIS 397 A Art and Climate Change. Winter 2017. Performance Art.

Inspired by Happenings, Allan Kaprow’s Fluids, and Francis Alÿs’ Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing Bennett took a large part in organizing, designing, and performing in Blue Ice. This durational performance art piece consisted of a large team of people bringing ice blocks to campus and interacting with them in performative actions while encouraging passers-by to carry a block as a performative action and living metaphor to the central location where the blocks would be assembled to symbolize a glacier and be lit up by the blue glow of the Fibonacci Spirals literally resembling the blue core ice of the rapidly disintegrating glacial ice. After an enlightening experience hiking in snow shoes through the winter wonderland of Washington’s ski mountain, Bennett was inspired by the sublime ecology for this piece.

I chose this piece because the experience of snow shoeing for my art and climate change class is one I will never forget as well as building our own glacier going through hours of freezing performance art. It was magical. I also played a large role in making this happen, curating, and designing marketing materials.

Bennett, Maura. Untitled-Various. February 2018. BISIA 135 A Acrylic Painting. Winter 2018. Project 1.

This is a series of four simple paintings done in acrylic by Maura Bennett. The images are seemingly unrelated and yet they share a similar aesthetic, color palette, and energy. A still life of candle, book, and crystal, a girl diving, a blue blood moon, and a tangle of neon tubing. The compositions are clean and dynamic, keeping the eye moving and paying attention to the battle between warm and cool and a preference for organic, round shape.

I chose these paintings because again I challenged myself with a very short timeline to complete them all, and I believe I achieved some interesting visual compositions. I enjoyed playing with color and concepts of identity and self with these. They were significant to me because they aren’t anything very special. I just had fun with these and did subject matter that I wanted but wasn’t conceptually very deep and it broke me out of a long painting dry-spell and I am grateful for that creativity again.

Bennett, Maura. Lost Treasure. March 2018. BISIA 450 A Image and Imagination. Winter 2018. Midterm.

Taking inspiration from mythology, Lost Treasure seeks to use photography and fabrication to capture realities that may not exist. By manipulating the environment you see, as well as the lens through which you see it, Bennett aims to create an image that suggests something magical, whimsical, and mysterious. Formally, golden sculptures create dynamic aesthetic focal points surrounded by ethereal landscapes that are meant to look not-quite-of-Earth. Perhaps you are seeing another planet, another dimension, another reality. Housed in those realities are the mythological treasures of that place. Instead of appropriating existing artifacts and the accompanying legends, Bennett wanted to create her own power objects and essentially write her own mythologies within each piece. This strategy leaves an enormous amount of vagueness and mystery in order to challenge the viewer to translate their own imagination onto the illusion, come up with their own stories, meanings, mythologies, and if nothing else spark a curiosity. Bennett’s piece is meant to embody the essence of fantasy, to make everything up, to imagine everything, from the visuals, to the objects, to the environment, to the meaning.

I chose this piece because it was the first series of images I did in this photography course. I challenged myself beyond belief, road tripping all over the state that week to get these magical, whimsical, and weird shots. I wasn’t aware this was a photography course and never intended to take a photography course but I ended up enjoying it like crazy and really let my creativity loose. I believe this course made me grow as an artist and I now love to implement photography in my artistic process from sketchbooks to reference photos.