Sue Scott Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new paintings by Kristopher Benedict entitled Fake Your Death. Opening January 15, 2009, the works will be on view through February 28, 2009.

This series of paintings was inspired by a brief event occurring during a fall residency in a small town in Pennsylvania, a fleeting but imagined sighting by Benedict of a friend who had died of a drug overdose several years before. After a double take Benedict realized the person viewed across the street could not be his deceased friend. The experience, however, triggered thoughts of “the double, the outcast, hopelessness, rebirth, visions or apparitions or phantasms, anamnesis, memory, small town life, escape, drugs and addiction,” ideas that form the foundation of this new work. That place between logic and fantasy that allows the question – what if this really was my friend, and his death had been a successful pseudocide – engages both artist and viewer in explorations of memory, truth, and myriad ways of seeing.

These paintings explore the connection between the idea of pseudocide and representation in painting. For Benedict, the title Fake Your Death is directed towards the reinvention, transformation, and falsehoods inherent in the way that these figurative paintings are made. Though Benedict draws his imagery from diverse sources – photography, internet images, comic books and movies – and is clearly inspired by late 19th century painters like Edouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard, William Blake and the Nabi – his interest lies in the leaps between different types of image making, questions of authorship and elliptical narrative. Kristopher Benedict was born in 1978 in Middletown, New York. He received his BFA from Cooper Union in 2000 and his MFA from Columbia University in 2002. Benedict lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. This is his first exhibition with Sue Scott Gallery.