Carol Benioff

Lives and works in Berkeley, CA, USA

Artist statement

My work explores how societal expectations shape self perception around relationship, gender and power. Emphasizing struggles around agency and feeling heard, I primarily focused on the unfair constraints placed on girls for many years. Currently, I am expanding these conversations to include themes of ecological loss and displacement. I begin with a drawn or printed base layer to represent my initial idea informed by history or an artifact. Drawing figures from memory, I obscure this base image with line, color and directional light to reflect the emotional oscillations between autonomy and belonging. These figures inhabit a fictional world that feels both familiar…and slightly off. The resulting drawings, prints, and paintings range in scale from small intimate prints to large paintings and installations. The driving force behind this work comes from my own history. Growing up in San Francisco under the gender norms of the 50s, 60s, and 70s—to be nice, quiet, accommodating, and contained—left me uneasy in my own skin. Even within my politically liberal household, traditional ideas about how girls and women should behave were embraced. Responding to this environment I developed a hybrid process of layering traditional etchings over digital paintings or prints depicting moments where cultural expectations collide with our lived experience. Expanding this approach to painting, I layer transparencies and overlapping figures to highlight distances between the privileged and...

Artwork