An American contemporary artist, Amy Bennett creates paintings of interior scenes and rural and suburban landscapes, exploring memory, narrative, themes of suburban life, and an awareness of our changing surroundings.

Born in Portland in 1977, Bennett currently lives and works in Cold Spring, New York. She holds a BFA from University of Hartford, Hartford, CT and MFA from New York Academy of Art, New York, NY. She exhibited her work in a range of venues, including Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, Richard Heller Gallery, Santa Monica, Galleri Magnus Karlsson, Stockholm, Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo, and Linda Warren Gallery, Chicago.

Using complex three-dimensional miniatures, Bennett creates her artworks through a painstaking two-stage process. Using cardboard, wood, Styrofoam, plastic, string, paint, glue, and model railroad miniatures, she creates scale models and dioramas of fictional places, populating them with figures acting out local history and snippets of narratives. Examining themes such as time, isolation, and transition, she is interested in the fragility of relationships and people’s awkwardness in trying to coexist and relate to one another. Featuring a town, neighborhood, lake, theater, doctor’s office, church, and numerous domestic interiors, the scenes she creates feel like a believable, but an alternate, fabricated world.

Featured image: Amy Bennett - Animals, 2018 (detail). Oil on panel. 3 1/2 × 6 in. 8.9 × 15.2 cm. Photo courtesy Miles McEnery Gallery