On View
STELLA DE MONT - THIS LIFE WANTS YOU
Opening Reception Thursday, April 2nd | 6-8 PM
Benrubi Gallery is pleased to announce This Life Wants You, the debut solo exhibition of American photographer Stella De Mont. The title is not a provocation — it is a proposition, and one that De Mont's photographs make good on with uncommon conviction. Working in landscapes of water, stone, and forest, De Mont makes pictures that locate the sacred in the body's encounter with the natural world. These are not documents of place. They are evidence of something that happened there.
De Mont's practice emerges from her work as an intuitive guide, leading immersive experiences in which participants are invited into states of openness and release. It was within these rituals that she began making photographs — images conceived not as portraits but as reflections, offering back to each subject a picture of themselves liberated from the hierarchies of identity and status. The camera, in De Mont's hands, becomes a kind of witness to what she describes as a direct encounter with the divine.
What results is a body of work of striking formal beauty and genuine spiritual weight. A figure floats in a glacial pool, arms wide, body small against the massive indifference of boulders and jade-green water — surrendered, but also luminous. A woman lies curled on a sand dune at dusk, the full moon burning above her in a wide blue sky, the curve of her back answering the curve of the earth. Throughout, De Mont is drawn to moments when the border between the human figure and its surroundings seems to dissolve — not in romantic idealization, but in something closer to fact.
De Mont is particularly drawn to the feminine as a site of intuition and receptivity, and she often photographs two or three figures together, finding in that small gathering an amplification of communion — bodies acting as extensions of each other and of the earth itself. “We are incredibly sophisticated energy beings, I hope to capture a transmission that is contagious, that makes our bellies soften with peace and belonging.” It is a quality her pictures genuinely carry. They ask something of the viewer — a willingness to be still, to look, to feel the pull of a life that is waiting.
Stella De Mont is based in Los Angeles. This Life Wants You is her first solo exhibition with Benrubi Gallery.
For press and other inquiries, please email: info@benrubigallery.com
ALIA ALI - WINTER HIGHLIGHTS FROM GLITZCH
Benrubi Gallery is pleased to announce Alia Ali’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.
Alia Ali is a Yemeni-Bosnian-US multi-media artist. Her work explores cultural binaries, challenges culturally sanctioned oppression, and confronts the dualistic barriers of conflicted notions of gender, politics, media, and citizenship.
Working between language, photography, video, textile, and installation, Ali’s work addresses the politicization of the body, histories of colonization, imperialism, sexism, and racism through projects that take pattern and textile as their primary motif. Textile is central to Ali’s practice. She reminds us of how significant fabrics are to our collective humanity: we are born into it, we sleep in it, we eat on it, we define ourselves by it, we shield ourselves with it and eventually we are swathed in it as we are put to rest. And while it unites us, it also divides us physically and symbolically. Ali’s work broadens this into immersive installations to move past language and offer an expansive, experiential understanding of self, culture, and nation. Weaving us, so to speak, to each other and in turn back to ourselves.
“Glitzch” considers this idea of a potentially minor technological malfunction, the inherent implication of a glitch is that of a surprise mistake or misstep within a specific framework or system of which it is breaking the rules. The glitch calls attention to that which it disrupts; the system that would have otherwise gone unnoticed and unquestioned. Ali’s “Glitzch” is an activated force, not a passive phenomenon. If an aspect of a system is in conflict with the framework that contains it, then it can attack that framework and call attention to the mistakes inherent in that system. (Zeller, “alia ali….) Glitzch can be a battle cry. Glitzch can be an opportunity.
Alia Ali is a graduate of Wellesley College and the California Institute of the Arts (CALARTS). She lives between New York and Marrakech and has exhibited in numerous solo exhibitions and art fairs across the globe. Her work is in collections at the British Museum, Princeton University, New Orleans Museum of Art, Tucson Museum of Art, Museum of Photography in Chicago, Benton Museum of Art, and a myriad of international private collections. Ali is a Jameel Fellow at the Victoria and Albert Museum and a Global Nikon Ambassador. Her work is held in notable public collections around the world and has been featured in publications including The New York Times and the Financial Times.
For press and other inquiries, please email: info@benrubigallery.com
VINCENT VALLARINO - TIMELESS BEAUTY, UNSEEN REALITIES
Benrubi Gallery is thrilled to announce our first solo exhibition with the legendary Vincent Vallarino. Vallarino has been a fixture of the art world since the 1970's as both artist and dealer. He began as a photographer studying with the great Minor White, and it is here 55 years later that he comes full circle, presenting "Timeless Beauty," an exhibition celebrating not only the exceptional body of work he has built, but a celebration of beauty itself: the grace and mystery of nature.
"In the late 1960s and early 1970s I was privileged to have studied with photographer Minor White for several years. He would tell me "It's not what it is but what else it is." It took me many years to understand the depth of these simple words. He instilled in me the ability to trust and follow my intuition, which took me to places I never imagined I could go. With my 8 x 10 view camera in hand, I slowly learned to capture what occurred on these intuitive journeys. I gradually became a consummate craftsman which enabled me an uninterrupted flow while photographing. A new door had opened for me and photography became second nature.
My focus has always been on beauty and form. The detail that my large negatives depict allows the reality of my subjects to form a super-realism that otherwise is unseen. Capturing reality in its simplest form is pure abstraction. Through my photographs I attempt to rearrange abstractions into an unrestrained sequence of mental images that become the essence of fantasy.
The show consists of a group of photographs taken over a 55-year period. They are entities unto themselves that embody my personal dreams of my own fantasy reality and how I view the world. "
- Vincent Vallarino
For press and other inquiries, please email: info@benrubigallery.com
