Myles Bennett is interested in the intersection of architectural drawings, 18th century landscape paintings, and the organized space of woven and raw canvas. For centuries, canvas has been stretched, primed, and conditioned for the creation of a multitude of genres of paintings, has been left bare, has been painted all white and all black, has been gridded with graphite, and has represented what we understand to be a picture plane. It is not that Bennett’s work subverts this, but enters into the conversation of what is a picture plane. His explorative process has led to figurative paintings, sculpture, photography, minimalist and maximalist drawings, and various forms of abstraction that combine these diverse mediums, all delving into what lies within and underneath this historic material. Whether the process lends itself to drawing lines guided by the canvas grain, inking into the cotton fibers, or the precise extraction of the canvas’s warp, leaving the weft behind, all tactics seek to fuse the artist’s curiosities and the surface’s condition into an aesthetic balancing act.
b. 1983, Nashville, TN