Jessica Benavidez

№. 03.15.23, 2023

Benavidez is a multidisciplinary artist currently obtaining their BFA at the University of Concordia located in Montreal, Canada. Originating from the rural farms of Quebec’s Laurentiens, she continues to draw inspiration from the beauty of nature while surrounded by a concrete city.

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Exploring themes of bodily objectification post-mortem and its relation to our living world is what Jessica Benavidez strives to encapsulate in her sculpture entitled “№. 03.15.23”, 2023. Created entirely from bovine bones and meticulously displayed upon plywood plinths to elevate the new forms created.

Ethically sourced from the family cattle farm, bovine bones have been reassembled to explore the boundaries of art making and forensic anthropology. Acting as an anthropologist of the distant future, Benavidez works intuitively from the bones and allows them to greatly dictate the shape they take to create the final form. Through a combination of balance and screws the once individual pieces of a past life come together to transfigure into a new assembled form.Benavidez was greatly inspired by the story of La Doncella, an Incan girl who’s mummified remains were found in the Andes Mountains and are now on display in a museum in Argentina. The mummy itself is so well preserved it appears to be simply a sleeping girl who has been placed in a glass box for spectators to gawk at. This raised several questions for the artist in relation to their own body and what is left behind. Benavidez looks at their own self and wonders at what point after the soul has left does the body become an object and at what point does that object become an artifact we can display. On a more global scale, more questions are raised around who can decide what body is considered an object and who assigns its value.

 To have these new forms on display challenges the idea of the body being considered as a subject or an object for spectating. This consequentially gives new significance to our relationship with our own bodies as both belonging to us and being an object to be left behind once our souls have continued on.