Almost Home

Almost Home presents works by Jesus Benavente and Kathleen Granados that examine uncertainties and instabilities surrounding the home. Through a physical embedding of objects, their work asks the viewer to consider tensions within these seemingly secure environments. The artists’ proximity to, and distortion of, recognizable domestic signifiers reorient our relationship to the household. In their uncanny constructions, Benavente and Granados prompt the viewer to reflect on the personal, political, and social tensions that affect the home.

Jesus Benavente’s work uses humor as an entry point into larger conversations about the targeting of Latinx communities and the forced separations of families in the US. In A Life, A Home and a Horse named Triste, Benavente installs an inflatable bouncy house with an inflatable horse inside, both named “triste,” Spanish for a gloomy sadness. Photographs document Benavente repositioning and compressing the house throughout the exhibition space, capturing his physical struggle and the uncomfortable insertions of the home within the gallery. The humor and childlike joy that accompanies a too-large bounce house mask more serious themes of forced migrations, displacement, and the continued need for reassimilation into new communities. With each compression, the house is at risk of popping, but each placement offers a new opportunity for both the house and the horse to live. The work reveals the difficulty of finding a new home, but also shows the love, strength, and ingenuity that come from people forced to risk everything to find safety and happiness. Benavente’s accompanying protest poster series acts as a personal and political rallying cry.  Bold proclamations like “I’ll Just Keep Forgiving You” and “Coraje,” Spanish for “courage” or a “righteous anger,” reveal that despite anticipated prejudice and maltreatment, Benavente finds strength, hope, and love for his national home.

Kathleen Granados explores memory, identity, absence, and inheritance through the legacies of craft, storytelling, and ritual. Her work considers the tensions embedded in domestic spaces, incorporating textiles, photographs, and items from her childhood house, current apartment, and partner’s family to create imprints and residues of heirlooms and personal objects. In her mixed-media dishtowel series, Granados presses common household items like spoons or scissors into fragmented and reconstructed towels. Each embedded element acts as a signifier of the home, while its draping obscures the viewer’s access to it. In Leftovers, composed of ninety-two antique, found, and family-owned spoons, Granados reverses this process. She presents the silver utensils pulled out from the cloth, now covered with residue from the dishtowel’s fibers. Granados’s beautiful and delicate objects create uncertainties surrounding the home, asking the viewer to question the solidity and physicality of their surroundings. Through this process, Granados highlights the domestic space as a place of nostalgia and comfort, but also of loss and unease.

Jesus Benavente is from San Antonio, TX and was a Spring 2020 Bemis Center Artist-in-Residence. He holds an MFA from Rutgers University, a BFA from The University of Texas, and has attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and Art Omi. His recent exhibitions and performances have occurred at The Whitney Museum of Art, Queens Museum, The Vera List Center for Art and Politics, Socrates Sculpture Park, LTD Los Angeles, among others. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Kathleen Granados is a New York-based artist. Granados uses family photographs and domestic, everyday materials to create works that span installation, sculpture, sound, and public projects. She graduated with her BFA from the Fashion Institute of Technology (2009), and is a recent graduate of the Hunter College MFA program (2020). Granados has held residencies at FIT (2019), Vermont Studio Center (2017), and LMCC Process Space (2015). Her work has been highlighted in Newsday, NY Daily News, The New York Times, and Hyperallergic.

Eliana Blechman is a curator and arts worker based in New York. She is the Associate Curator at Time Equities Inc. Art-in-Buildings, a public art program that brings contemporary art by emerging and mid-career artists to non-traditional exhibition spaces. Previously, Eliana held positions as Curatorial Associate at AC Institute, a nonprofit experimental gallery space, and as Project Coordinator at CITYarts, Inc., a nonprofit public arts and education organization. She is pursuing her MA in Art History at Hunter College, where she is also enrolled in the Advanced Curatorial Certificate Program, and she received a BA in Art History and History from New York University.      

Special thanks to It Is Framing.

Photos by Marcie Revens.