Q&A With Misty Bennett About "Candy Crush" Art Show at BPL
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| Meet Misty Bennett, visionary behind "Candy Crush," an art exhibit on display at the Central Library. |
Birmingham, Ala. - Professor Misty Bennett, the Art Department Chair at the University of Montevallo, is the visionary behind “Candy Crush,” a fascinating painting exhibition on the first floor of the Central Library in downtown Birmingham.
Misty Bennett: Candy Crush is the latest installment of the Birmingham Public Library’s Art for Everyone series. The exhibition was made possible by a grant from the Alabama State Council on the Arts , awarded to the BPL Friends Foundation to benefit the library.
In a Q&A with BPL Public Relations Director Roy Williams, Bennett talked about what inspired several of her paintings. Candy Crush will be on display at BPL through March 29, 2024.
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.
BPL: As someone who loves to play the game “Candy Crush,” I love that is the name of your art exhibition. Tell me about how you came up with that.
Bennett: “The title of this show, Candy Crush, is a reference to the color palette of my work, which includes mostly bright, saturated colors, like you might find on the candy aisle at the supermarket. They are designed to draw you in and keep you there, much like the viral game we love to play on our phones. I always like to reference a darker side with my work, and that’s where the “crush” part of it comes in.
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BPL: Tell me about this painting Reverse Heirloom
Bennett: This painting was done as a collaboration with my daughter. She did the spray painting on the background, and I painted the forms on top, based on pictures I have taken over the years of what I find in her school lunchbox at the end of the day. It’s always a surprise and over the years it has taught me a lot about her. The title Reverse Heirloom refers to the ways in which our children sometimes become our best teachers.
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BPL: Tell me the vision behind the paintings Stockpile and A la Carte.
Bennett: Stockpile is on the left, while A la Carte is on the right. In Stockpile, I wanted to stack forms and create visual relationships between the solid and the void, that call to mind other forms in my previous paintings. My works on paper are the newest paintings, and they are a little less tied to reality than some of the others. In A la Carte, I was creating a sort of menu based on forms I love to draw, but separated and laid out as individuals.
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BPL: What inspired your painting "The Happy Sad"
Bennett: One of my earliest paintings in this series, The Happy Sad is based on the iconic McDonald’s Big Mac, deconstructed and abstracted into pieces. The title references a feeling that often accompanies meals—regret.
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BPL: Tell me the vision behind the paintings Bookends and EZ Peel.
Bennett: Bookends is on the left, while EZ Peel is on the right. In these works on paper, I am working with the same subject matter, but in a more abstract and expressive way. Bookends is about relationships and connections, and the role food plays in them. EZ Peel is both an homage to one of my favorite painters, Brice Marden, who died this past year, and a painting about pulling away the layers of something to find out what’s inside.
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