Olympia is pleased to present New Strangeness Bloom, Heather Benjamin’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Benjamin’s paintings investigate the hyper-vulnerable experiences of existing in a female body. Building on her formal printmaking background and a prolific, two-decade-long zinemaking practice, her autodidactic paintings emerge as self-portraits.
Through a diaristic lens, Benjamin’s figures—part goddess, part flawed protagonist—manifest spiritual transformation. These figures navigate imagined desert landscapes, alive with unnameable flora shimmering under electric skies. Both literal and symbolic, these "strange blooms" embody perseverance and renewal amidst psychic and physical terrains that are barren, parched, and alien.
Benjamin’s approach to painting nods to Surrealist modes of narration and the idiosyncrasies of outsider art. Motifs such as impassioned couples floating in clouds or emerging from extraterrestrial blooms evoke dream states, memories, and internal monologues. Words scrawled across cowboy hats and bootstraps read like fleeting, nonlinear poems.
In New Strangeness Bloom, Benjamin explores sexuality, gender, trauma, and self-perception through intricate, labyrinthine mark-making, maximalist palettes, and a developed personal symbology. Broken mirrors, dead cockroaches, nail-polished claws, and butterflies blend with retro-futurist Americana, warping, refracting, and reimagining mythologies of femininity.
The exhibition’s title is drawn from Diane di Prima’s Loba, a seminal feminist epic that, like Benjamin’s work, conjures self-actualization through mystic meditations on womanhood.
These psychological landscapes, inhabited by curious deities, unfold as mysterious wastelands where new myths take root. Like the mutant flowers that blossom in a parched desert, Benjamin’s figures endure, inhabiting a world where growth, desire, and survival are inextricably intertwined.
