INTERLOCUTOR Interviews (Tyler Nesler)

Songwriter/violinist/actress Eszter Balint’s stage production of I Hate Memory, originally set to premiere in 2020 but postponed due to the pandemic, finally premiered this past summer with two performances at Joe's Pub in NYC, and now she is set to release an album of songs from the show (available November 18 via Red Herring Records). Written by Eszter and based on an original concept by her and Tony Award-winner Stew, I Hate Memory is an “anti-musical” “co-starring the Streets of New York and the Late 20th Century featuring Family, Film, Fame, Immigration, Joy, Theater, Shame, Dance Floors, Open Doors, Papaya Ice Cream, and the Shah of Iran’s Wife.”

In this interview, Eszter goes into detail about the genesis of the show, why she cringes at the word "memoir" and the concept of nostalgia, but also why she still wanted to find a way to honestly tell her unique story of growing up in a Hungarian experimental theatre family in the gritty milieu of the late 70s/early 80s NYC downtown art and music worlds, the highly talented production cast, and more...

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Born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, Steven Montgomery describes himself as having, “...an affinity for the aesthetics of damage, destruction or any evidence of the passage of time.” His earthenware creations pay homage to the once-thriving industrial capital, its degradation, and subsequent resurgence. Incorporating elements that honor the regality of Detroit’s auto industry and its machinery and recognize its more recent issues with the safety of its water supply, Montgomery creates vessels that look more like futuristic Bronze Age sculptures than pottery.

In this episode, we catch up with Steven and dig deeper into his work with a focus on his series TOXIC CON, which viscerally comments on the health of the world’s water supply via the Flint Water Crisis. This conversation further expands on his INTERLOCUTOR Magazine interview from May 2021.

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Artist Nick Bautista writes, "I have often been reluctant to talk about my work. I have even been hesitant showing or exhibiting it - I suppose that can be problematic for a painter. The images I choose to paint, rather the ideas of the images, I treat very personally, almost protectively. I see them as fragments of private journal entries. After all, they address my personal situations and struggles, or whatever I might be experiencing in my life."

Despite his reluctance to talk about his work, Nick sat down with INTERLOCUTOR Magazine founder Tyler Nesler for a wide-ranging discussion about his projects and creative drives, the personal struggles and deep self-reflections which have inspired his creations, along with recountings of his harrowing experiences with ultra running, which have included being stalked by a pack of coyotes through the mountains while pushing his body and mind to dangerous extremes.

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Joseph Keckler is a singular artist, a performer and creator known for his expressive and powerful voice, sharp prose and stirring songs, and absurdist, bizarrely heroic operatic monologues, which "dance between comedy, commentary, and communion."

Hailed by the New York Times as “major vocal talent…a singer whose range shatters the conventional boundaries…with a trickster’s dark humor,” his original performances have been presented by Lincoln Center, Cenre Pompidou, NPR Tiny Desk and many others. His first collection of writing, Dragon at the Edge of a Flat World, was published by Turtle Point Press in 2018.

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Shapeshifting through time, space, and spirit, Uhl’s debut EP Channels is a genre-bending and vocally explorative collection of songs threaded together not as much by their similarities as by their nuanced differences. 

Showcasing her operatic background through a pop lens, Uhl makes dynamic music that is as informed by Mozart and Puccini as it is by art pop divas Kate Bush and Annie Lennox. The results are enigmatic, dramatic, and transportive and will certainly appeal to fans of contemporaries like Weyes Blood, Perfume Genius, and Cate Le Bon.

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KIDLEW is an NYC-based color-blind Chorean (half-Chinese/half-Korean) artist. Born in Queens, NY, and raised on Strong Island, he started doodling the cartoon characters he saw daily on TV as a kid and soon discovered graffiti art on 1970s NYC subway trips with his grandmother. Big into skateboarding and metal music as teen, he segued into the music scene in the 90s and then studied toy design before returning to graffiti art as a part of the EX VANDALS crew. Now he may be best known for his character Lumpy Bumpkin, who has made appearances all around NYC and the world.

In this wide-ranging interview, KIDLEW gets into his roots skating and tagging as a suburban teen, his ups and downs as a musician in the 90s, his return to graffiti art in the 2000s, his involvement with the legendary Queens mural space 5Pointz, how Lumpy Bumpkin originated, and much more.

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An interview with artist Vonn Cummings Sumner about his visual takes on the iconic cartoon character Krazy Kat, from George Herriman's wildly weird and wonderful newspaper comic strip that ran from 1913 to 1944 and influenced countless artists working in many styles. Sumner currently has a solo show called Second Nature at Washington DC's Morton Fine Art, which is his second show at the gallery featuring Krazy Kat works.

The gallery writes, "Sumner returns to the wandering, curious avatar with Second Nature, escorting the titular figure through newly verdant, water-pooled landscapes, open spaces and art historical-coded landscapes, longing for escape and a reconnection with nature. Genderless and endlessly depicted, Krazy Kat stands in for 'everyman,' but rarely has their roaming path seemed to follow a strange inner voice that might be its own, but also Sumner’s—raising the question 'who’s following who?' as both go about a grand tour of references, past and present.

Second Nature will be on display through April 8, 2023.

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Zhivago Duncan was born to a Syrian mother and a Danish father in Terre Haute, Indiana. His fluidity across materials and cultural signifiers reflects the relentlessness of an investigative mind. With freewheeling creativity spurred by his curiosity, Duncan’s lifelong impulse towards painting demonstrates his desire to contemplate, negotiate and comprehend the “big picture”: the origins of sentient life and the universality of consciousness.

In this interview, Zhivago deeply explores his process, motivations, and ambitious themes. He also discusses the series of works and the unique nature of the gallery layout of his current exhibition Mapping Out Unification at Colector in Monterrey, Mexico - on view until April 21, 2023.

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Known for his paintings featuring a solitary astronaut wandering through scenes filled with pop culture iconography, Scott Listfield creates works which invite viewers to perceive the contemporary world from a slightly askew and alienated perspective. He currently has a solo show, AM Gold, at NYC's Harman Projects, up through April 29.

Listfield calls AM Gold, "a show about music and time travel. I was inspired by the kind of physical artifacts we mostly don't have, don't need, or don't care about anymore: Album covers, CDs, posters, cassette tapes, stereo equipment (with actual knobs), band flyers, zines, photos cut and pasted from magazines, mix tapes shared amongst friends, passed down from cooler older siblings, or made to impress crushes." The show is also accompanied by several Spotify playlists with music from the 70s through the 2000s.

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The creator of the band the Bloods—the first out, queer, all-women-rock band—Adele Bertei has made a career as a singer, songwriter, writer, and director. Her resume, which spans decades and disciplines, is a who's who of the ’80s underground—performing and recording for artists such as Culture Club, Whitney Houston, Sandra Bernhard, and Matthew Sweet, to name a few.

But her formative years bore little resemblance to her celebrity-studded adult life. In Twist: An American Girl, Bertei recounts her troubled childhood in 1960s and 1970s Cleveland, telling the story through the eyes of “Maddie Twist,” a stand in for Bertei herself. As she says about her alter-ego in the author’s note, “I needed protection while taking the journey back through the war zones of my youth.”

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Founded in 2020, Philippe Labaune Gallery focuses on graphic design by featuring high-level artists whose common point is to explore new territories and to decompartmentalize the borders separating various modes of expression: illustration, painting, comic strips and animation.

In this interview, Philippe talks in-depth about his lifelong passion for narrative art and how he came to start his gallery after a long career in the finance industry, in addition to the different ways that comic art has been perceived in Europe compared to the United States, and why those perceptions are now changing.

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Jeffrey Everett is a successful designer, illustrator, and author working outside of Washington, DC. Jeffrey has had the pleasure of designing and illustrating for a wide variety of entertainment, corporate, and non-profit clients. Jeffrey has created designs for such bands as Jason Mraz, Social Distortion, Foo Fighters, The Decemberists, Flight of the Conchords, Gaslight Anthem, Lou Reed, The Bouncing Souls, and A Day to Remember. He has created work for companies such as RedBull, Simon and Schuster, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Washingtonian, Variety, Universal Records, LiveNation, Dreamworks, and more.

Jeffrey's Kickstarter-funded book Let It Bleed celebrates 20 years of concert posters and will be released soon.

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KIDLEW is an NYC-based color-blind Chorean (half-Chinese/half-Korean) artist. Born in Queens, NY, and raised on Strong Island, he started doodling the cartoon characters he saw daily on TV as a kid and soon discovered graffiti art on 1970s NYC subway trips with his grandmother. Big into skateboarding and metal music as teen, he segued into the music scene in the 90s and then studied toy design before returning to graffiti art as a part of the EX VANDALS crew. Now he may be best known for his character Lumpy Bumpkin, who has made appearances all around NYC and the world.

We first talked with KIDLEW back in March 2023, but even 80 minutes wasn't enough to cover the scope of his shenanigans - listen here for a further dive into his early years as a creative troublemaker, learn more info about his time in the music biz, the specifics of how he got back into street and graffiti art in the 2010s, how his signature character Lumpy Bumpkin developed along with his stable of other characters + MUCH more...

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Sayazake is a visual artist who operates in the realm of Photography, Illustration, and Painting. His work speaks to a conversation of adventure, spirituality, anime, and eccentricity.

In this interview, Sayazake talks about his expressive origins in performance and theater and what attracted him to pursue visual art in his early twenties, plus his thoughts on artistic influences, the commercial art world, his unique approaches to portraiture in both illustration and photography, and much more.

Sayazake will release his latest body of work, Erasure, available exclusively on his website starting July 5, 2023, about which he writes, "This body of work focuses on topics of spirituality and facing your shadow. Working with the shadow aspects of yourself and integrating them to find deeper strength. This idea came to me while I was pretty sad about how a situation turned out after taking a pretty big risk. Grateful for the experience as it helped me become wiser and also draw some pretty great things." He will also have work up in the group show Free Your Mind, opening July 8 at JCAL in Jamaica, Queens.

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Martine Johanna is a Dutch-born female artist who has been actively exhibiting her work since 2007, starting from little daily drawings to Amsterdam street art with a small band of brothers. Within two years, she developed into a full-blown painter, saying farewell to her job in design and going back to her artistic roots while part-time residing as a freelance lecturer at the HVA.

Johanna has exhibited internationally, including exhibitions at commercial galleries in Amsterdam, San Francisco, New York, Aalborg, Los Angeles, and San Diego. She has participated in exhibitions at cultural institutions, including the Mesa Arts Museum in Arizona and Collectie de Groen in Arnhem.

In this interview, Johanna discusses her overall thematic approaches and the works displayed in her third solo show for New York’s Massey Klein Gallery, How to Eliminate Stress and Anxiety Through Good Housekeeping. Read our May 2023 Interlocutor Magazine interview and our 2020 interview, both conducted by contributor Isabel Hou.

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Pete Min co-runs the innovative Los Angeles label Colorfield Records. At Colorfield, artists are encouraged to compose in the studio and often play instruments they’re unused to. There’s as much emphasis on sound as there is on composition and musicianship, and “chaos and chance are a big part of the process.”

In this interview, Pete delves into what he calls his "sherpa" approach to guiding musicians out of their comfort zones and allowing them to express themselves in new and exciting ways. He talks about his background in music production and the freeform pandemic jam sessions with friends that led to the creation of his organic and playful approach to recording Colorfield albums at his studio, Lucy's Meat Market.

Colorfield has already gained a solid reputation for releasing albums rich with expressive experimentation from artists such as Benny Bock, Anna Butterss, OHMA, with a forthcoming album Collodion by the accomplished jazz guitarist Anthony Wilson.

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Gigi Chen’s work creates an aesthetic that combines her training as a traditional animator and painter, along with her love of the techniques of Old Masters. Entrenched in the art of storytelling, the work pulls together her love of contemporary idioms of cartooning, photorealism, texture, and design to produce works that coalesce into Love, Craft, and Fun.

Born in Guang Dong, China, and raised in New York, Gigi’s exhibition credits include Stone Sparrow Gallery, Superfine! Art Fair, Deep Space Gallery, and Antler Gallery.

In this interview, Gigi discusses her deep admiration of birds and why she loves to place them in settings that mix the natural world with artificial aspects such as neon. She also discusses the deeply personal large indoor mural she created as part of a residency project with 4Heads in 2022 at NYC's Governors Island. Joining us in this episode is her friend and fellow artist Dan Alvarado.

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Born in Los Angeles in 1968, guitarist and composer Anthony Wilson is known for a body of work that moves fluidly across genres. The son of legendary jazz trumpeter and bandleader Gerald Wilson, his musical lineage has deeply influenced his creative trajectory, compositional choices, instrumental groupings, and the wide-ranging twelve-album discography that blooms out of them.

In this interview, Anthony discusses his newly released album Collodion, which he recorded with producer and engineer Pete Min for Los Angeles’s innovative Colorfield Records.

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“Everyone is fascinated by crime,” says author/musician Harper Simon. “When you look at the history of song, romantic love songs may be the dominant mode of songwriting, but second would probably be songs involving crime—murder ballads, for one. Crime is a major theme in all songwriting.”

Simon offers a new and expansive contribution to this legacy with Meditations on Crime, an ambitious multi-media project that includes an album he produced of musical collaborations with a sweeping range of contributors (Julia Holter, Gang Gang Dance, King Khan, the Sun Ra Arkestra) and a book he edited featuring essays by such notables as Ben Okri, Miranda July, Hooman Majd, and Jerry Stahl, alongside artwork from giants like Cindy Sherman, Tracey Emin, Julian Schnabel, and Raymond Pettibon. 

In this interview, Simon talks with host Tyler Nesler in detail about the genesis of this project and its development over several years into its present multifaceted form.

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French-American artist Miles Hyman has a solo show, Secret Lives, up at NYC's Philippe Labaune Gallery through December 23. Hyman's recent paintings lead us on a journey through his sources of inspiration. From his early childhood memories of the Ferris wheel in Bennington, Vermont, to his travels with his jazz musician father, to the bustling streets of New York, to the romantic embrace of Paris, where he has made his home for the past two decades, every stroke of his brush is a testament to that odyssey.

The culmination of his artistic pilgrimage leads him to Italy, a country to which he already shares a deep artistic connection. Here, he weaves the pages of the Louis Vuitton travel book, an ode to the eternal city of Rome. These works are studies of light, imaginative juxtapositions, and records of personal geography. Alongside his paintings, there will be a selection of original strips from his latest graphic novel adaptation, La vie secrète des écrivains, penned by French author Guillaume Musso.

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Tyler Nesler talks with leading AI researcher, author, and TED speaker Blaise Agüera y Arcas about his new book, Who Are We Now? - an exploration of how biology, ecology, sexuality, history, and culture have intertwined to create a dynamic “us” that can neither be called natural nor artificial.

Identity politics occupies the front line in today’s culture wars, pitting generations against each other, and progressive cities against the rural traditions of our past. Rich in data and detail, Who Are We Now? goes beyond today’s headlines to connect our current reality to a larger more-than-human story.

The book is available December 19 via Hat & Beard Press.

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Virginia L. Montgomery (VLM) is a multimedia artist working across video, performance, sound design, and sculpture. She is known for her unique, synthesia-esque, surrealist works that unite elements from mysticism, science, and her own lived experience as a neurodivergent individual. Her artwork is surreal, sensorial, and symbolic. It shifts in subject matter from stones to moths and machines, as VLM deploys an idiosyncratic visual vocabulary of repeating gestures and recursive symbols like circles, holes, and spheres.

In this interview, VLM discusses her recent solo exhibition at Austin's Women & Their Work, Eye Moon Cocoon, which featured her ongoing examination of native Texas Luna moths and our multifaceted associations with the moon, along with her unique parallel career as a Graphic Facilitator.

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aja monet is a poet, lyricist, writer, and community organizer from Brooklyn, now based in Los Angeles. Her debut studio album, when the poems do what they do, was released in 2023 to acclaim, and it earned a GRAMMY® nomination for Best Spoken Word Poetry Album.

We published a version of this interview in the online edition of INTERLOCUTOR on February 1, 2024, and this episode is the full and unedited recording of the discussion between aja monet and our Contributing Editor, Logan Royce Beitmen.

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Lara Aburamadan is an independent visual artist, journalist, and co-founder of the Refugee Eye organization. Born in Gaza City, Palestine, she is now based in the United States. She holds a BA in the Faculty of Communication Sciences and Languages from Gaza University.

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Lara tends to embrace the human perspective through visual storytelling; her work explores the social and political narratives for refugees and marginalized communities. She captures documentary and artistic images of everyday life and excels at catching light and moments with intimacy and humanity.

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She has been photographing since 2010. Her photographs have been published in a variety of news organizations and online websites such as Time Magazine, VICE, San Fransisco Chronicle, WorldPressPhoto, NPR, Refinery29, The Progressive Magazine, Pacific Standers, Al-Jazeera, Syria Deeply, +972, and elsewhere. Time Magazine has chosen Lara among 34 women photojournalists around the world whose work you should follow. She's also a member of Women Photograph and Survival Media Agency.

In this interview, Lara discusses her upbringing in Gaza, her move to the US with the assistance of writer Dave Eggers, and her aims to portray images of Gaza that show the everyday life and culture of its people rather than the usual bleak and war-torn imagery that is often presented in the media.

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Julia Hannafin is a writer and artist from a two-mom family in Berkeley, California. Their first novel, Cascade, was published with Great Place Books in April 2024, an independent press founded by Alex Higley, Emily Adrian, and Monika Woods.

Cascade is a propulsive novel set on the Farallons—a rugged set of islands off the coast of San Francisco—about addiction, sex, gender, loss, and whether any of us can escape our biological inheritance. After her mother’s overdose, Lydia goes to work for her ex-boyfriend’s father, tagging and monitoring great white sharks. As rare and unforeseen interactions between species threaten her team’s research, so does Lydia’s growing infatuation with her boss. 

In this interview, Interlocutor Fiction Contributing Editor Nirica Srinivasan talks with Hannafin in detail about Cascade and its development.

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Chloë Cassens is the representative of the Severin Wunderman Collection, the largest in the world of works by iconoclastic French artist Jean Cocteau. It makes up the entirety of the contents of the Musée Jean Cocteau-collection Severin Wunderman in Menton, France. 

She is a longtime scholar of Cocteau with a unique perspective, as she is Wunderman’s granddaughter. Her past research has centered around Cocteau’s Les enfants terribles and its echoes in the later life and work of Yves Saint Laurent, as well as Cocteau’s Opium: Journal d’une désintoxication and how it illuminates the role that drug addiction and sobriety plays in the lives of creatives. In this extensive interview with Logan Royce Beitmen, Cassens discusses Cocteau’s massive cultural influence and her efforts to increase awareness about his life and legacy.

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A Cultural Anthropologist trained in Linguistic Anthropology, Ethnomusicology, and Folklore, Alex E. Chávez is the author of the book Sounds of Crossing: (Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño).

Chávez's debut album, Sonorous Present, an immersive poetic and musical passage, extends sonic meditations on loss, migration, and mourning across America’s borderlands. What began as an improvised performance in 2019—inspired by the music and poetics of Chávez’s book Sounds of Crossing—has been reimagined as a studio album in collaboration with Grammy Award-winning producer Quetzal Flores.

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A candid and expansive talk between INTERLOCUTOR Contributing Editor Logan Royce Beitmen and Christiana Ine-Kimba Boyle, the Managing Partner of CANADA Gallery. She plays a key role in shaping the gallery’s program and strategic direction. She recently returned to CANADA after serving as Senior Director and Global Head of Online at Pace Gallery, where she expanded the gallery’s artist roster by bringing on renowned painter Kylie Manning in Spring 2022 and spearheaded its digital evolution by establishing and activating a robust online sales strategy.

Boyle’s curatorial practice is driven by a commitment to equity and intergenerational dialogue, as seen in her debut exhibition at Pace, Convergent Evolutions: The Conscious of Body Work, which brought together 17 artists from the gallery’s program alongside figures from her wider network. She continues championing new perspectives in contemporary art through exhibitions such as Beyond the Frame: Abstraction Reconstructed and Rest and Reprieve: A Window into Creative Solitude. Through her work, Boyle remains dedicated to expanding the reach of contemporary art, engaging collectors, and fostering dynamic connections between artists and institutions.

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JMikal Davis, aka Hellbent, is a muralist, painter, and street artist who lives and works in Brooklyn. Davis began making street-based artwork in the late 1990s while still in art school at the University of Georgia.

Upon graduating and moving to Brooklyn in 2000, he took up the nom de plume Hellbent, experimenting with various media and becoming known for his hand-carved plaques that he pulled throughout New York City and eventually across the globe. 

Since 2011, the backgrounds that started on these plaques became the focal point of his work both on and off the street. The abstract configurations of multiple patterns layered on top of each other are derived from American quilt-making and folk art traditions, inspirations not typically associated within murals and street art. 

In his public work, he aims to include elements from different textiles associated with the citizens of the community and weave them together harmoniously.

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Artist Heather Benjamin discusses the works in her first solo show at NYC's Olympia Gallery, NEW STRANGENESS BLOOM.

Benjamin’s paintings investigate the hyper-vulnerable experiences of existing in a female body. Building on her formal printmaking background and a prolific, two-decade-long zinemaking practice, her autodidactic paintings emerge as self-portraits.

Through a diaristic lens, Benjamin’s figures—part goddess, part flawed protagonist—manifest spiritual transformation. These figures navigate imagined desert landscapes, alive with unnameable flora shimmering under electric skies. Both literal and symbolic, these "strange blooms" embody perseverance and renewal amidst psychic and physical terrains that are barren, parched, and alien.

Benjamin’s approach to painting nods to Surrealist modes of narration and the idiosyncrasies of outsider art. Motifs such as impassioned couples floating in clouds or emerging from extraterrestrial blooms evoke dream states, memories, and internal monologues. Words scrawled across cowboy hats and bootstraps read like fleeting, nonlinear poems.

In New Strangeness Bloom, Benjamin explores sexuality, gender, trauma, and self-perception through intricate, labyrinthine mark-making, maximalist palettes, and a developed personal symbology. Broken mirrors, dead cockroaches, nail-polished claws, and butterflies blend with retro-futurist Americana, warping, refracting, and reimagining mythologies of femininity.

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