Sammy Bennett is an interdisciplinary artist that works across painting, printmaking, textiles, and installation to depict an intimate and idiosyncratic world. Surrounding neighborhoods and apartments become both a backdrop and overarching portrait of the artist, as he employs materials sourced from the city and his own family's history. His rural Michigan, blue collar background and experiences living in Brooklyn manufactures strong dichotomies between analog and digital, country and city, high and low culture, inside and outside, soft and hard. His works often reference quotidian settings such as bedroom interiors with vibrant wood grain flooring, dirty windswept sidewalks and cluttered grassland parks. These seemingly banal spaces pumped full of melodrama give recognition to everyday life as a constant struggle, while his subjects are surrounded by large swaths of pattern, conveying an existential loneliness and dark undertone offset by humor, saturated color and a playful collage-like aesthetic. Littered in these Dutch Vanitas-esque landscapes are an assortment of scavenged mass produced consumer products interwoven with personally worn textiles, which tap into a shared collective memory, and allow his personal identity to become absorbed as another commodity.
