Gretchen Bennett

This year Gretchen Bennett developed a site-specific work for the Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle, and her work is to be featured in The River is the Road exhibition at the The Sacred Heart Chapel, Riudosa, TX. In 2010, Bennett was awarded a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Swing Space residency on Governors Island. In 2009 she was awarded an Artist Trust GAP Grant toward making a piece featured in the Seattle Art Museum video gallery in 2010. Her work was also included in the exhibition “Kurt”, at the Seattle Art Museum.In 2008 and 2009 She was awarded residencies in Iceland with the The Association of Icelandic Visual Artists. She received her MFA at Rutgers University in 2001.

A central characteristic of her work is the use of unorthodox sculptural materials and combinations - including found debris, ranging from collected street stickers to windfall sticks from the forest floor. A recent characteristic of her work - and one, which emphasizes its extra-linguistic properties - is its use of music and lyrics. This is a recent development for her work, in the form of compatible song lists, video works and recordings of new songs.