Whether exposed and flush with pleasure, obscured by thickets of pubic hair, or leaking menstrual blood, the 28-year-old explores that charged part of the female body in all its gore and glory when it comes to art.
Early on, the New Jersey native used old copies of Penthouse and Playboy, as well as vintage nude photos culled from flea markets and thrift shops, as raw material for her illustrations. The erotica helped power the many art zines she released. In “Sad Sex,” put out in 2008 when she was a student at the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design, nearly all the images were informed by her mighty collection of print porn. But while many of the women depicted posed with the alluring swagger of pinup models, their facial expressions or actions were anything but centerfold-friendly.
One work featured a woman spreading her pussy lips with one hand, the other reaching toward the viewer in agony. Her eyes are scratched-out, her mouth is agape in horror, but she sits beside the words “YOU MAKE ME FEEL SPECIAL,” the capital letters dripping blood.
From the start, Benjamin’s work has included images of women mutilating their nipples, threatening their labia with scissors, or flexing in ecstasy as insects swarm their limbs. Imagine the deviant, DGAF attitude of an R. Crumb comic, fused with Leonor Fini’s surrealist explorations of femininity, and you’re getting somewhere close to a Benjamin artwork.
Yet despite the carnal carnage she regularly depicts, a sensuality and agency emanates from her characters, especially because they usually appear alone. This tension is not unlike the ambivalence most of us feel about our own bodies — that vacillation between love and loathing of our flesh. It’s a duality that fuels Benjamin’s practice, and she’s able to translate this abstract, almost ineffable experience into something both visceral and vivid.
“Looking back, I feel like ‘Sad Sex’ was a metaphor for my extreme confusion and self-hate and depression at that time, which was manifesting in a very teenage way because I was a teenager. In order to express it, I was resorting to extremes [in my work] because I felt so extreme,” Benjamin says. She’s quick to point out that she still has a “dichotomous relationship with my body and other people’s bodies — this really extreme fluctuation between perceiving beauty and experiencing lust, and then alternatively experiencing disgust and repulsion.”
Since “Sad Sex,” Benjamin has self-released numerous other zines (most of which sold out), participated in dozens of art exhibitions, and become something of a cult figure within the East Coast punk scene, with her illustrations adorning countless DIY gig posters.
In 2011, the Vancouver band White Lung (fronted by Penthouse editor Mish Barber-Way) posted flyers featuring Benjamin’s ink drawing of a woman pulling out her hair, veins bulging on her hands. Scrawled in the corner of the illustration are the woman’s stream-of-consciousness thoughts, including the line, “My God… I cause my own suffering through my desire to think of myself as a being of value and permanence.”
In other words, Benjamin’s work continues to explore many of her early themes. “I’ll probably be wrestling with them for the rest of my life,” the artist says.
But since her student work, Benjamin has honed her voice and technical skills, and expanded her visual language to the degree. This development is captured in the new book Cavegirl Monologue, which she describes as an anthology of work from the past five-plus years. “I really tried to organize it in a way so it wasn’t perceived as a retrospective, but rather a collection of my work from a specific period,” she says.
Released by the Brooklyn record label and art-book publisher Sacred Bones (they’ve issued music by David Lynch, Pharmakon, and Zola Jesus, and books by illustrator Alexander Heir), Cavegirl Monologue compiles 150 pages of Benjamin’s drawings and paintings in full color. The hardcover showcase — and the cachet of the publisher — means Benjamin’s art, by turns arousing and grotesque, titillating and disturbing, will find even more fans.
Yet even as this book is being published, its creator speaks of transitioning into a new season of her practice and life. With a breakup in her recent past, and having made a decision to return to New York City after several years in Providence, Rhode Island, she’s feeling reinvigorated, and says this energy is apparent in the text’s newest images. As Benjamin puts it, this work expresses “growth and exploration and sensuality, because that has so much to do with my experience of reconnecting with myself.”
Since sending Monologue to the printer, Benjamin has been attending artist residencies, curating group exhibitions, and focusing more on larger-scale paintings. She describes her latest work as “looser,” less “cerebral.” That said, she’s not done drawing clitorises and bodily fluid in her signature, Janus-faced style — erotic, disquieting, and incendiary, all at once.
Asked how she hopes her work will be received, Benjamin says she’d like it to resonate with anyone who can “identify with aspects of my own experience of womanhood and sexuality, especially the darker stuff.” The boundary-pushing artist continues: “I’m trying to create something beautiful and stimulating out of pain and trauma — that’s my ultimate catharsis. When it works, and people can relate to it, that’s the biggest high for me.”
Photo of Heather Benjamin by Justin Cole Smith
