Michael Benevento and Kristina Kite are pleased to present Phantom, still, a group exhibition featuring works by Fiona Connor, Hélène Fauquet, Margaret Honda, Devin T. Mays, Megan Plunkett, Michael Queenland, and Megan Francis Sullivan.

The works in this exhibition begin with objects that arrive already charged by the lives that shaped them, carrying the index of a human or other living presence. A persistent, slight unease runs through the show; the sense that something has just left, or never quite did.

Megan Francis Sullivan's The gift (2026) originates from a 2012 visit with the artist Jo Baer in Amsterdam. Sharing a love of horses, Baer surprised Sullivan by gifting her several pairs of riding pants from her days as a rider. Sullivan held on to them for years, unsure how to understand them as objects. Following Baer's death in January 2025, Sullivan began a project of remaking the pants, first as prototypes and later with the help of a professional pattern maker and sewers, using painting canvas as the fabric. The gift is simultaneously a relic, hand-me-down, sculptural object, but also symbol of a transfer of affinities between artists.

A related haunted-ness runs through Michael Queenland’s Memorabilia (2004). An old table holds a spread of carefully arranged books, photographs, and other found objects — a Benny Goodman LP obsessively annotated by the previous owner; a Billie Holiday biography open to some of the last known photographs of her, and Stephen King’s author photo playing the guitar on the back cover of his novel, It. Similar yet distinct representations of hands repeat across several items. The collection speaks to the spookiness of the ready-made, as well as that of the photographic.

Devin T. Mays’s Flag (2025) presents a taxidermied bobcat mounted on a constructed wall. A flag is a stand-in for something absent; it marks a territory, or announces an allegiance. Here the animal becomes that kind of placeholder; presence and absence occupying the same form. The wall-mount echoes trophy culture, but Flag refuses the triumphalism with the neutrality of its installation.

Megan Plunkett's photographs document accumulations of objects constructed by her mother during her experience of dementia. Plunkett recognized them as sculpture and photographed them, in an act of both witness and preservation. The images carry the residue of a mind making meaning in its own way, arrangements that follow their own internal logic, charged with a presence that is intimate and elusive.

Fiona Connor’s bronze shoes are cast from pairs owned by friends and colleagues. They hold their form with the permanence of small monuments, shaped by use and wear, at once fetish object, love token and record of a body in motion. Margaret Honda’s Sketch #3 (2020) pairs the toy ball belonging to her late dog and her own slightly crumpled felt hat. The pairing is a study in what proximity and use leave behind.

Hélène Fauquet's Freshwater mussels (2025) presents mussel shells within an ornate pearl-bordered frame, an inkjet print behind them — the cast-off remains of a living thing, belonging to the vocabulary of memorial, of something worth keeping.