October 13 – November 19, 2017
Gibbs Street Gallery
Opening Reception: Friday, October 13, 7 – 9 PM
Stephanie Benassi’s art practice concentrates on the use of photographic images and processes to conceptually engage the contradictions, limitations, and fragmented simplifications that are inherent in photography. Specific research, travel, and material experimentation are developed into gallery installations that incorporate straight photographs, performative process-based works, and sculptural elements to create a complex visual and material experience. Drawing from diverse photographic genres such as landscape, forensic, Victorian memento mori, occult, and camera-less photography, she investigates the ways in which the material conditions and specialized languages of the photographic medium shape our relations to history, power, and the production of images.
About the artist: Stephanie Benassi (b.1980, Providence, Rhode Island) is a conceptual artist working primarily with photography. Benassi has participated in artist residencies including Vermont Studio Center and Virginia Creative Center for the Arts. She has shown her work at James Madison University, Broward College, Kutztown University and Loyola University Maryland and has been nominated for the Janet and Walter Sondheim grant as a semi-finalist in 2014 and 2015. She received her B.F.A. in photography from University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and her M.F.A. from Virginia Commonwealth University. She currently lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland.
