THE Magazine - Los Angeles

Revelation and restraint are flawlessly balanced in Amy Bennett's latest series of narrative oil paintings set along the shoreline of a picturesque vacation paradise. At the Lake successfully plays with the tensions between our ability to observe, our desire to know, and the propensity to imagine. By offering carefully arranged scenarios inhabited by just enough of the ominous and uncanny, the artist tugs at the speculative, romantic, and downright meddlesome parts of our gazing selves.

In fact, Bennett invites conjecture by way of precise and repetitive formal arrangements. With few exceptions, she introduces a shoreline across the middle of her panels and in so doing, effectively doubles the world. Whatever human drama unravels on shore amidst a backdrop of evergreen trees and summer vacation homes is reflected with equal emphasis on the lake's calm surface. This symbolic border between the observable world of Bennett's characters and the less certain, forbidden reality of what motivates them, is ultimately where our eyes come to rest and our minds begin to wander. Bennett intensifies this relationship to her world by casting the viewer out onto the lake as foreboding scenes of misfortune and mystery unfold.

Her previous work, Neighbors, set in Rockwellian suburbia, used equally engaging and fastidious methods to explore the interior/exterior divide in modern American life. While that particular narrative was parallel in tenor to the tableau photography of Gregory Crewdson, and evoked shades of Edward Hopper, Bennett is dramatically set apart by her process. For months prior to picking up her brush, the artist constructs a three-dimensional model of an imagined environment, populating it with a cast of characters who will interact according to her inventive desires. From this meticulous miniature universe emerges a collection of distinctive scenes in paint; fragments of a larger web of intrigue whose ultimate secrets remain guarded by the artist.