“Photos of Gifts,” a new exhibition by Heather Bennett, lecturer in art in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, is on view through Nov. 11 at the Bruno David Gallery, 7513 Forsyth Blvd.
Bennett’s fourth solo show with the gallery, “Photos of Gifts” collects a series of photographs that capture their subjects in a transient state, that brief moment in which “the gift object, pampered and prepared, veiled and decorated, [is] ready to be torn open and revealed.” The image of the wrapped gift suggests both the ephemerality of the photographic moment and the history of depictions of women, which too often transform their subjects into objects — a process that Bennett subtly reverses.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog of Bennett’s work. Also on view through Nov. 11 are “Cloud Images-Eclipse,” which collects 41 drawings and one sculpture by Leslie Laskey, professor emeritus of architecture; and “Window Women,” an installation by Sam Fox School alumna Jill Downen, who earned a master’s degree in fine arts in 2001.