Sculptures Make Bulletproof Memories

Artist Michelle Benoit was in the right place at the right time to collect remnants came from special bulletproof plexiglass panels designed to protect President Obama during speeches made in 2008.

The Rhode Island artist has since repurposed the materials in the service of her art. This is now on view, together with the paintings of co-exhibitor and Massachusetts-based artist Stacey Alickman, at Reynolds Fine Art in New Haven’s Ninth Square.

Benoit’s mixed media works of wood, plexiglass, and various coloring agents engage the element of light as it passes through the layers of plexiglass, often appearing to be generated from within the heart of the geometric tinted blocks. For Benoit, it is a way to examine her own history.

“I use color as a symbol of a memory or the memory of a color as an event from my past,” she stated. ​“Sometimes I use colors from very different time frames and memories and put them together to see what it would look like. It’s my way of changing outcomes or the sequence of things.” Benoit likens her work to ​“contemporary geologic core samples” — an analogy that describes the essence and approach to her art making in which Benoit turns inward, to her own past, excavating and sampling memories and impressions, that for many, are often lost to time.

Benoit’s ​“Untitled 2” is a sculptural, three-dimensional form of beveled and faceted surfaces revealing layers of exposed laminated wood. The tinted blue plexiglass insert is fitted with architectural precision, offering an icy-smooth contrast to the wood solids. Opalescent with subtle translucent tonalities, the moody plexiglass provides gradients of depth. It is a pool of thought, memory, and connection.

While Benoit was in graduate school, artists Gordon Matta-Clark, William Anasstasi, and Rachel Whiteread influenced her use of three-dimensional materials and her modernist, conceptual bent. Their unconventional, evocative approaches to architecture, sculpture, and design often challenged perceptions, requiring new ways to think about form, space, and time.

Stacey Alickman’s textural manipulations — abstract works that evoke unearthed and exposed artifacts from the distant past — are created with great patience and the element of time. Rather than using texture-building additives to her paint, the artist said she allows the paint itself to dry in layers in the build-up to resolution.

Her dense mark-making creates a kind of time capsule, surfaces and textures of which are later revealed through her archaeological process of removing layers of paint to expose the evolution of the image. In ​“Pompeii,” as the title would suggest, one can almost see bodies — fixed and frozen in the lava and ash that consumed them. The painting’s jagged format edges add to the notion of an excavated prize. The intentional pentimento process of revealing underlying layers through sanding and peeling offers glints of complementary color that catalyze the work.

Hanging most prominently in the Reynolds Fine Art Gallery window is Alickman’s oil, ​“You Break It You Own It.”

The final iteration of this painting was created without additional brush work or any reworking of the original painted surface, other than a subtractive method of paint removal. A rich, hieroglyph of marks and textures emerges, evoking the passage of time or prolonged exposure to the elements.

For Alickman, painting is about the paint itself and the journey of process. Paintings in some instances, may suggest representational imagery as in the case of ​“Quindi” where there is a strong visual reference to fossilized leaves or feathers. But it is the lush topography of paint, its rhythmic flow and sensuously gripping color harmonies, that arrest the viewer and ultimately, have one thinking about their checkbook balances.

Reynolds Fine Art is located at 96 Orange St. in New Haven. The exhibit runs through April 30.