Michelle Benoit’s work is made of wood and several layers of a translucent lucite that are painted and assembled over each other. This process creates an internal glowing effect in the work and causes the reflected light of each layer to appear in a new way every time you look at it. The work becomes a tangible remembering of isolated moments in time, and a way of visually capturing constant, fluid layers of experience through colour and light. Her use of washes of paint on reclaimed, bulletproof lucite, and wood, provide the work an inherent history within its materiality. Each composition is composed in relation to the size of the fragments that she collects, and the colour combinations are coded and symbolic of a past, a present, a memory, and a place. She sees the work as “a contemporary geologic core sample, a very personal, yet collective landscape.”
Benoit received her BFA from Rhode Island College and an MA and MFA from the University of Iowa. Her work has been exhibited at museums and institutions such as The Makeshift Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Muscarelle Museum of Art, Williamsburg, VA; Bristol Museum of Art, Bristol, RI; Harper Center for the Arts, Clinton, SC; Sarah Doyle Gallery at Brown University; Jamestown Arts Center, Jamestown, RI; New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, CT; and more. In addition, her work is in many public and private collections including Memorial Sloan Kettering’s permanent collection, The University of Iowa Museum, and The Swain School of Design.