Chapter NY is thrilled to announce, CLOSER, Cara Benedetto’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. Her immersive installation will feature a series of dye-sublimation prints, a PowerPoint video, a large-scale wall vinyl, velvet stanchion ropes, and a collection of printed ephemera including xeroxes, lithographs, and printed silk handkerchiefs.

Benedetto’s multimedia practice examines the creation of value and its ingrained structures. Through printmaking, writing, performance, pedagogy, and video, Benedetto embraces the poetics of contradiction through pluralism. Her work layers gendered language with content from popular media that embody ideologies of progress that prevent femme-identifying subjects from voicing their true wants. Formally trained as a printmaker, Benedetto emphasizes the hierarchy of different forms of print media and embraces the physicality of the medium as a metaphor for the fragility of our present moment. Her images and text together reveal the alienating effects of patriarchal capitalism and present complex voices that are open and multivalent. She creates interruptions as a form of resistance, finding optimism, gentle understanding, and empathic vision.

In CLOSER, Benedetto centers white women, specifically femme-identifying celebrities, as false arbiters of progress and unknowing accomplices in the subjugation of vulnerable populations. At odds with the allegedly subversive or abject characters they frequently represent in film and TV, the celebrity relishes their status awarded to them by the oppressive, dominant culture that they serve.

A series of prints combine images of actors winning awards—such as Olivia Colman, Frances McDormand, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge, among others—with poetic, fictional testimonies of people ‘coming to’. Examples of ‘coming to’ include waking from a night terror or gaining consciousness. Benedetto embellishes these printed image and textual collages with Prismacolor and sharpie, mimicking an obsessive ‘fangirl’ aesthetic. The women depicted in the images, with open mouths and languid eyes, embody extreme examples of achievement. The accompanying text, however, articulates a world where being awake, gaining consciousness, or living life under the structures of power feels like a loss—where living is equated with mourning.

People often say they dream of winning an award. Winning lives inside of our unconscious minds yet remains largely unattainable. CLOSER extends Benedetto’s ongoing Against Coming series, where coming, arriving, or winning in phallocentric terms is continually thwarted. The artist uses obfuscation as a gesture to break apart these ascendent and unavoidably elitist aspirations to make space for collective reimaginings of a culture built with love.

Cara Benedetto (b.1979, Wausau, Wisconsin) lives and works in Richmond, VA. She received her MFA from Columbia University in 2009. Benedetto has had solo and two-person exhibitions at Chapter NY, New York; Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Michael Jon Gallery, Detroit; Art Metropole, Toronto; and Young Art Gallery, Los Angeles; among others. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; the Hite Art Institute, Louisville; The Pit, Los Angeles; The Blueproject Foundation, Barcelona; The Jewish Museum, New York; Art in General, New York; Cooper Cole, Toronto; and the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; among others. Benedetto is an associate professor in print media at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Benedetto is the author of two experimental romance novels, The Coming of Age and Burning Blue, and is the editor of Contemporary Print Handbook, published with Halmos. In 2020, Benedetto published her first collection of short stories, Origin of Love and Other Tales of Degradation.