“Misty Bennett: Candy Crush” Art Exhibit Opens at the Birmingham Public Library

 

The Birmingham Public Library is excited to announce the opening of two new art exhibitions at downtown’s Central Library. Misty Bennett: Candy Crush and Stacey Holloway: Othernesses are the most recent installments of this year’s Art for Everyone series. 

 Misty Bennett: Candy Crush features vibrant oil paintings that express Bennett's perspective on both the surplus and scarcity of food in American society. Her abstract imagery is inspired by the expressive power of color and texture, which she uses to explore the notion of food as a metaphor for our psychological and emotional states of being. 

Bennett teaches at the University of Montevallo. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from the Savannah College of Art and Design and a Master of Fine Arts in Drawing and Painting from the University of Georgia. 

 Her work has been exhibited across the Southeast, most recently at the Alabama State Council for the Arts Gallery in Montgomery, the Red Clay Survey at the Huntsville Museum of Art, Lowe Mill in Huntsville, and the Tennessee Valley Art Museum. It is also featured in collections at the Carmichael Library, the Alabama State Council on the Arts, the College of Osteopathic Medicine in Dothan, Alabama, and the President’s Collection at the University of Georgia.

 See more of Misty Bennett's work on Instagram @misty_bennett_painter. Artwork in this exhibition is available for purchase, and the artist receives 100% of each sale. For sales information, contact the artist at BennettMJ@montevallo.edu. 

 This exhibition was made possible by a grant from the Alabama State Council on the Arts. The grant was awarded to the BPL Friends Foundation  to benefit the library. 

Misty Bennett: Candy Crush will be on view through March 29, 2024, on the first floor of the Central Library. The library is open Monday through Saturday from 9:00 am to 6:00 pm, with extended hours until 8:00 pm on Tuesday. 

 Artist’s Statement

"Candy Crush is an exhibition of my recent oil paintings, which are abstractions based on imagery that comes from an everyday aspect of my life. Food is the perfect vehicle through which to express my complex feelings around our culture, as both overconsumption and under-consumption are issues our society struggles with. Food, to me, is a way to get into the whole mess of who we are. I use food imagery as inspiration and then let my imagination go where it wants to. I change the colors of the foods which inspire my paintings to take away their original intent and invite the viewer to think about them in broader terms as symbols rather than specific ingredients. 

The bright colors reference the intensity of feelings that can accompany eating. Mark-making, pattern, and texture play a large role in my process, and I find them to be endlessly enjoyable. I use these elements along with appealing saturated colors to create images that are both attractive and then secondarily somewhat repulsive. For me, this is the essence of our relationship with food, seen through the lens of our American culture. There is desire, and a sense of attraction, playfulness, and some surrealism, and these coexist with a bit of darkness and a gentle warning about the price of excess."

By Margaret Splane, Library Assistant III|BPL Community Engagement & Fundraising