BENJAMIN, Heather
Cavegirl Monologue

Heather Benjamin’s work has been exciting and unsettling viewers for ten years and counting. Having spent years with her practice firmly rooted in DIY zine and comics culture, Benjamin’s drawings of ultra femmes covered in blood, bugs, lipstick, and leg hair have typically been made with the intent of mass reproduction, through photocopying and screen printing. With her new work, Benjamin moves in an a more expansive direction, creating pieces whose primary motivations are not exclusively to be reproduced and reprinted as their final form, but are instead made to be viewed as singular and precious objects. For the artist, this new intention opens up infinite possibilities to experiment with scale, color, and medium, in ways she had not yet attempted.

Cavegirl Monologue is Benjamin’s most substantial collection to date and the works range from the most minuscule of talismans to larger than life representations of female creatures. Much of the art in this collection is new and unreleased, but it also contains a selection from her artist’s books and foldout zines, including the recent Romantic Story collection that was wildly popular and is now out of print. It also contains paintings from her 2017 debut solo exhibition at Dress Shop in Brooklyn.

“Because of my roots in DIY zine and comics culture, visual narratives are important to me, though I tend to pursue them in less traditional and more non-linear ways,” Benjamin explains. “I’m interested in the stories that form within a singular image as well as in how the images relate to each other through shared use of iconography and theme.”

[publishers’ note]

With a foreword by Reba Maybury : )

Published by Sacred Bones Books, 2018
Comics & Illustrations / Sex