smoke the moon presents Big Cowgirl, a solo show of new work in drawing and painting by Heather Benjamin (b. 1989, New York). Big Cowgirl expands on Benjamin’s distinct visual language: a maximalist landscape of animist feminine hybridity. Across various mediums, the artist develops scenes that create new narrative terrains for a central figure that transcends the boundary of the human. In the kaleidoscopic desert of Big Cowgirl, the cowgirl may become the sphinx and the sprite may become the superhero. Tropes of female sexuality and western expansion are turned inside out in this show: revealing an interior landscape at once powerful and grotesque.

This solo exhibition debuts a series of new works that are particularly interested in an intricate relationship to material and questions of scale. The six prints (each an edition of five) that make up the central Big Cowgirl series are filled with Benjamin’s characteristic hyper-focused line work rendered anew through a laborious process of hand painting over screen printed liquid graphite. Benjamin works within a highly detailed set of processes that she invents for herself. These prints are some of the artist’s largest undertakings to date, representing a devotion to both repetition and a meditative state of mark-making and the totemic status of these works. 

With roots in punk and DIY zine communities, Benjamin’s work is evident of a fascination with both the power of high fantasy and material lineage. In the meeting of these two poles, the artist has carved out a zone for herself and others that both incorporates the experiential world while defying its rules and limitations. Benjamin has always been drawn toward an aesthetic mode that is devoted to ornamentation and embellishment. This impulse can be traced back through a long history of creative practices associated with craft traditions and historically feminized artistic labor. The artist nods to these inherited frames while expanding the boundaries through which ornamentation might be expressed. 

Through Benjamin’s diligent attention, feminine interiority becomes an avatar of itself. In that excavation, Benjamin turns the personal into the mythic and the representational into the fantastic. Big Cowgirl is a fever dream peeling back layers of accumulated meaning. Benjamin’s imagined universe is both the fantasy of a girl alone in her room and the mystic lunacy of a desert turned on a neon edge.