Photo by Leigha Mason
Defenseless Blossom, 2025, Acrylic, gouache on canvas, 29 x 25 x 1 in. (73.66 x 63.5 x 2.54 cm)
LISTEN VIA THE PLAYER BELOW courtesy of Acast (the episode is also available on the Apple podcast app, Spotify, iHeart, and YouTube).
In this interview, artist Heather Benjamin discusses the works in her first solo show at NYC’s Olympia Gallery, NEW STRANGENESS BLOOM.
Benjamin’s paintings investigate the hyper-vulnerable experiences of existing in a female body. Building on her formal printmaking background and a prolific, two-decade-long zinemaking practice, her autodidactic paintings emerge as self-portraits.
Through a diaristic lens, Benjamin’s figures—part goddess, part flawed protagonist—manifest spiritual transformation. These figures navigate imagined desert landscapes, alive with unnameable flora shimmering under electric skies. Both literal and symbolic, these “strange blooms” embody perseverance and renewal amidst psychic and physical terrains that are barren, parched, and alien.
Benjamin’s approach to painting nods to Surrealist modes of narration and the idiosyncrasies of outsider art. Motifs such as impassioned couples floating in clouds or emerging from extraterrestrial blooms evoke dream states, memories, and internal monologues. Words scrawled across cowboy hats and bootstraps read like fleeting, nonlinear poems.
In New Strangeness Bloom, Benjamin explores sexuality, gender, trauma, and self-perception through intricate, labyrinthine mark-making, maximalist palettes, and a developed personal symbology. Broken mirrors, dead cockroaches, nail-polished claws, and butterflies blend with retro-futurist Americana, warping, refracting, and reimagining mythologies of femininity.
