AMY BENNETT: Shelter

"A short story must be brief, zeroing in on just a few moments in time, and charting a course between them to give an impression of vastness. A character’s whole life is understood by way of a handful of scenes, much the way in each of her paintings Bennett portrays one moment, one scene, accessing a great volume of feeling, and staggering depth, while operating within even stricter limits. Here there is no passage of time, no beginning, middle, and end. There is only the constant present of the painting."

- Robert Long Foreman in "Gimme Shelter"

"There is a humanism in Bennett’s paintings that exceeds the detachment of their underlying postmodernism. The paintings are alert to storytelling, loss, and memory’s mutual presence and absence—what the art historian Michael Ann Holly has called 'melancholy' in relation to the discipline of art history. The tug of curiosity we feel at Wilhelmina’s (as I’ve styled her) insistent reading in Cool Kids or at the prone woman sunbathing well into the night in Basking is also the initial moment that I fathom being that woman, feeling what she feels. Western philosophy tells us that the formation of identity requires the presence of another against whom we define ourselves, yet Bennett’s pictures probe the overlaps, rather than the separations, between our experiences that permit such imaginative leaps."

- Elizabeth Buhe in "Amy Bennett: How Wondrous to Watch Ourselves"