Interview, Gretchen Bennett

If you live in Seattle, you've probably heard of Gretchen Bennett. Or you've seen her work -- she splits her time between Seattle and Brooklyn, leaving a trail of fawns and other whimsical stickers in her wake. She also put up a few of her Nirvana stills on the old Jack in the Box for the Broadway public art project, STart on Broadway.

Here's my conversation with Gretchen:

I wanted to loosely recreate a scene from Gus Van San't film, Last Days, in which a small band of party people have just come home. As they literally begin to pile into the living room, someone puts the Velvet Underground's Venus in Furs on the turntable and sings along in the post-party, pre-dawn haze.

The song is erotically charged, but my delivery, following along roughly with the original, is very lo-key and private. I wanted to re-depict those moments. I wanted to reflect certain lyrics Lou Reed evenly sings: I am tired, I am weary, I could sleep for a thousand years.

Gretchen, what I love most about your work is the intimacy and the tenderness in execution. There's a sense of labor, but it's almost like care-taking. Is there something in your work about invoking the past, about nurturing memory?

It's about memory. And about re-enactment as self-description. Its the capture of what might have happened in an actual moment of importance, as a fictive presentation on-screen by Gus Van Sant (the scene from "Last Days"), and then re-presented by me. This process is elliptical like song lyrics or a book reread after a few years. The second or third reading of something is different from the first. The broad strokes I use to replay this stretch of the film are intentional. My depiction of this Van Sant scene is like the time between readings, when you are recalling by memory what happened. I’m not trying to recreate the scene, I'm covering it, in the way a musician covers songs.

What do you most look forward to in this year's Seattle Erotic Art Festival?

I'm hoping there is ice cream

Give us one thing you think is unexpectedly sexy:

intellect, lavender ice cream


Thanks so much for giving me your time Gretchen. It's been really fun to work with you on this project!

For more details on the event and how to get tickets, please visit SeattleErotic.Org!

Gretchen Bennett, Venus in furs 2009 video still (detail)
image courtesy of the artist

Gretchen Bennett Have a Hangover 2008 Prismacolor pencils on paper
image courtesy of the artist