HEATHER BENNETT

REMIX

November 7 - December 27, 2025 | Opening Reception | Friday, November 7, 2025 | 6-8 pm

Bruno David is pleased to present REMIX, an exhibition by multimedia artist Heather Bennett. This is the artist’s sixth solo exhibition with the gallery.

REMIX is a body of work which takes Heather Bennett’s past works, her archive, as material to create new meanings and stack them. The archive has long been a focus within contemporary art, serving as remembrance, testimony, past and proof, and as raw material to be remade and recast.

Heather Bennett describes her process and reflects on her body of work saying, “Using past work as a generative foundation, I build on top, interject and juxtapose my current perspective, honoring the evolution of the work and my own point of view as it morphs and transforms and grows in the current context.  Originally, 20 years ago, I used myself in the picture to reference the artist subject playing the female object, a classic feminist strategy and legacy to complicate objecthood.  To author these photographic images, I put together teams of models, make-up artists, photographers, and assistants. I illustrated female tropes, attempting to bring out assumptions regarding such images in our culture and question them.  I wrote fictions soaked in reality.  Each image was created in my gaze, but not fully of it.  In this current moment, inevitably, I look back at my inventions from a different angle of view.

To complicate, enhance, and fold over again this layered relationship, I have worked with text and sound, video and photography to install these images anew. In Judy Concatenated, 2023, I filmed my original large photographic work, Judy from 2005 intending to interrogate my own gaze. Judy is a work I made as part of the 2005-2006 series “The Uncovered Works of Hannah Berman” which quotes stereotypical representations of women in contemporary media. Judy was the forlorn, aging B-movie star.  I projected my 2023 video of Judy upon the same framed photograph from 2005, adding a recent address, recorded in my voice, written in second person, and layered with a heavy feedback guitar (in collaboration with musician Jon Lumley) pushing right up to the voice. I also photographed Judy, 2005, sealed up and coming back out of her crate and wraps (Judy Veiled), resituating and problematizing my own gaze as a fog and yet a clarification.  She is a character, not me, but a former me playing a type. The audience originally was meant to see not just the character, but the artist playing her. She became a confidant and a foil, a conscious check. Retroactively, she becomes more, as layers are added compounding the critique to reveal a dark foreboding innocence and new repercussions. What does my gaze mean upon a self within a work meant to critique the gaze in the first place?

With REMIX I gaze alongside the viewer, hoping our stories rise, seep and seethe, smolder and sparkle and add something new to what we already know so well.”.