McKenzie Fine Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent sculpture by Foster, Rhode Island- based artist Michelle Benoit. This is her first solo outing after exhibiting in multiple group shows at the gallery since 2017. The exhibition will open with a reception for the artist on Friday, April 24 from 6 to 8 p.m. and run through Sunday, May 31, 2026.

Michelle Benoit’s luminous sculptures, made from layered bulletproof Lucite colored with acrylic, draw from the artist’s experience of color as an evocation of memory, personal experience, and an acute sensitivity to the changing conditions of the natural world. Benoit likens her layering of color selections to a geologic core sample, with its distinct strata and variances. Benoit is interested in how color mixes, reflects and refracts with the addition of light. The transience of time is embodied in the works through their inherent capacity to change with varying light conditions.

All but one of the sculptures in the exhibition are wall-mounted, some consisting only of Lucite. Here color passages travel and modulate, changing in the light as the viewer moves around the rectilinear, banded forms. Despite their solidity, sections can appear translucent and then opaque, solid, then weightless.

Most of the works in the exhibition include hardwood plywood. Benoit contrasts the linear, patterned striations and soft earth tones of the natural wood surface with the hardness of man-made Lucite. Sections of both wood and Lucite are cut, layered, and laminated, then carefully sanded into curvilinear, organic shapes. The contrasting materials imbue the work with a nearly irresistible tactile quality with smooth, rounded surfaces and glowing light. In some works, hard edges have been rounded and softened, and the backing wood material has been brought forward. As Benoit notes: “This rounding of the peripheries pulls the history forward to the face of the work, allowing the past to become more present. In a way, this is a manifestation of the invisible for me, to see time all at once in an existent art object.”