Gavin Benjamin | In the Air Tonight
Brandt Gallery is delighted to present, In the Air Tonight, a nostalgic showcase by multimedia artist Gavin Benjamin. Deriving its title from Phil Collins’ seminal 1981 song, the exhibition locates Benjamin’s practice within the intersections of autobiography, popular culture, and collective memory. Drawing on his experience of coming of age in New York City during the transformative 1990s, Benjamin constructs a visual archive of a cultural moment, one shaped by music, nightlife, politics, fashion, and the evolving mythology of the city.
Working across mixed-media collage and pop-inflected figuration, Gavin Benjamin deploys vibrant color, graphic silhouettes, and layered imagery to explore how personal memory is shaped by the images and cultural references that surround us. During his time at the School of Visual Arts, Benjamin found Manhattan to be a playground for discovery and reinvention, immersing himself in its nightlife and drawing inspiration from club culture and the extraordinary procession of cultural icons, downtown personalities, and unforgettable characters that defined the era. Memories of the Limelight, Palladium, and Club USA became formative experiences, shaping a creative vision rooted in experimentation, glamour, spontaneity, and personal freedom.
Benjamin’s new series of collages emerges from this period of observation, exploring the tension between visibility and anonymity, individuality and performance, and memory and mythmaking. He describes the 1990s as a threshold between the birth and death of privacy—a time before smartphones, cameras, and social media made constant documentation ubiquitous, when people could move through the city unrecorded and continually reinvent themselves. These works preserve fragments of a disappearing New York, transforming personal recollections into layered portraits of a city, a generation, and a state of mind that can never fully exist again.
At the heart of In the Air Tonight is an investigation of memory as both lived experience and cultural artifact. Benjamin revisits the past not simply to commemorate it, but to examine how identity is constructed, remembered, and continually reimagined through the visual language of popular culture.
Gavin Benjamin is a multifaceted artist who combines original analog photography and appropriated images with collage, paint, and varnish to create rich and luxurious works that call back to baroque traditions while incorporating elements of current culture to provoke, critique, and explore. Benjamin investigates the intersection of culture, media, politics, fashion, and design, addressing questions that (continue to) confront a man of color in America today. Born in Guyana and raised in Brooklyn, Benjamin earned his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York City, whilst interning with renowned portrait photographer Arnold Newman. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at Slick Paris, Sotheby’s New York, the 2024 Havana Biennial in Cuba, and major art fairs and exhibitions across the United States and Europe. He has also been an artist in residence at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art, where his acclaimed series Heads of State, Night Fever, and Miss a Thing have been featured.
In the Air Tonight is on view during gallery hours Wednesday to Friday 11am-5pm, Saturday to Sunday from 1-5pm, and by private appointment. There will also be an opportunity to meet the artist on Friday, October 23rd from 5-70:30pm at the Opening Reception. Private appointments and virtual catalogs can be requested by emailing brgalleries@gmail.com or calling 614.223.1655.