Abigail Ogilvy Gallery is currently presenting Cover Story, a two-person exhibition featuring Teddy Benfield and Tara Lewis.The artists’ practices explore the symbolism and dialogue that emerge through depictions of everyday objects and places. Once the exhibition was installed we noticed a similarity between the artists that extends beyond the canvas: both artists are educators living and working in the Northeast (USA). Our Assistant Director, Michaela Dehning, sat down with the painters to dive deeper into their practices:
Michaela Dehning: Cover Story is inspired by everyday subjects: cars, houses, books, shoes. What draws you to the everyday, and what does it allow you to explore that other subject matter might not? How do you think the meaning shifts when an ordinary subject is translated into an artwork?
Tara Lewis: I gravitate to everyday objects because of the meaning they can carry. In many of my paintings, I include things with type on them, like a t-shirt, slippers, or book covers. Everyday things are both an opportunity and a vehicle to push a narrative and present relatable content in a painting. They come loaded with cultural memory, design, and associations. Many of the books I paint also exist as films, so they function less as singular objects and more as shared cultural images. Titles like The Graduate, Psycho, or Sofia Coppola Archive are already doing a lot. As paintings, they shift from something you read in passing to something you sit with. A book like Dracula brings in a different kind of weight. It’s historical, literary, and cinematic all at once.
In my studio, I have the actual books and slippers I’m painting. In the paintings, the bow wraps the books and introduces a kind of pause. The soft satin ribbon contains something that often holds a much more potent narrative inside. That juxtaposition is central. The exterior can feel controlled or even preppy, while the text and references point to something more psychological or emotionally charged. Many of these references orbit coming-of-age: awakening to desire, danger, and the realization that the world is more complicated than you thought.
Tara Lewis with Psycho Paperback, 2026. Oil on linen, 24 x 18 in.
Teddy Benfield: What draws me to the everyday is the documentation of life lived and time spent. It is relatable regardless of the specific subject. As I view myself foremost as a still life painter, this body of work pushed me to look outward into the idea of New England backyards and properties to document the passing of time through possessions owned, things lived in and forgotten, the idea of a new beginning, as seen with my blueprints, and finally through a documentary approach to detritus.
I think my work draws the viewer in through relatability at first glance and keeps their attention through nostalgia, vanitas, and other emotions tied to the genre of still life painting. A genre traditionally pictured indoors takes on a new breath when moved outside, while still encapsulating the emotions of possessions and memento mori. A lot of my work has been inspired by common objects of everyday life: food and goods, and more recently, belongings like cars or boats. These commonly seen subjects lend themselves well not only to my work, but to still life as a whole, as the passing of time can be tied to these images and the way we each choose to behold both objects and time.
Michaela: You both practice in the Northeastern U.S., a region with a strong sense of history and culture. Teddy, your subjects feel closely tied to that place, while Tara, your work seems less directly rooted in regional identity. How do you think Northeastern culture influences your work, whether prominently or more subtly? How do you choose your subjects?
Teddy Benfield with Untitled (Off the Lot: For Sale) , 2025. House paint, acrylic paint, oil stick, oil pastel, china marker, ink on wood panel, 18 x 24 in.
Teddy: The Northeast has always influenced my work. I was born in a small fishing town in coastal Connecticut that erupted into a tourist town from Memorial Day to Labor Day. I’ve always found this concept interesting, as though we all live for that four-month pocket of the year while using the other eight months to prepare for it. Through this idea, my work began documenting that feeling specifically through commonly seen and relatable goods. Looking through the lens of shellfish and citrus, commonalities between the subject matter of my work and traditional Dutch still life began to appear.
My interest in the fishing and restaurant industries has been a vessel for depicting both the passing of time and a life well lived, while at the same time allowing room for gritty, painterly approaches to mark making. New England as a whole is a place rooted in dichotomy, and through this body of work I’ve looked to explore class, culture, and trade while bringing to light the commonalities between everyday New England and seventeenth-century Dutch still life.
Tara: I grew up consuming pre-internet culture voraciously — films, magazines, book covers, advertising, and fashion editorials. That was my window to a wider world coming from a small town in New England, and I think it permanently shaped how I see. The objects I paint are artifacts of that experience. They’re not about a specific place so much as the cultural landscape I was navigating and the images that stayed with me.
While I live and work in the Northeast, my subjects tend to come from a broader cultural conversation. Fashion editorials, coming-of-age films, iconic graphic design, and literary references are a huge part of my visual diet. There’s also a visual language that feels academic and slightly idealized — a preppy, coming-of-age tone embedded in many of these references. Something like The Graduate sits in that space culturally. It’s about transition, identity, and performance, which aligns closely with what I’m exploring.
New York has also been a huge influence on my aesthetic, particularly the overlap between art, film, fashion, and literature. That energy exists in tandem with the world of New England academia and aspiration that surrounded me growing up. I tend to choose subjects where text, image, and object all work together. You may recognize them quickly, but the meaning doesn’t settle immediately.
Michaela: Images carry symbolism that isn’t universal, but specific to a person, time, and place. This creates a tension between the intended meaning of a subject and how it is ultimately interpreted by a viewer. Do you try to guide interpretation in any way, or do you prefer to leave meaning open-ended? How do you contend with the loss of control between what you create and how it’s received?
Teddy Benfield, Untitled (Off the Lot: Car Chase), 2025. House paint, acrylic paint, oil stick, oil pastel, china marker, ink on wood panel, 18 x 24 in.
Teddy: I try to combine symbolism with an open interpretation of self. In my work, I like to leave the viewer at a getting-off point. The imagery is there, the subject matter is there, the title is there, but the element of nostalgia or absence is left to the viewer. I’ll use mark-making techniques like scribbles and “X”s to guide the viewer’s eye around the composition in hopes that nothing is missed.
My titles are all “Untitled (_______),” meant to create a relationship between whatever the viewer sees within the work and the title and subject matter I have chosen myself. I like for my work to live within the parameters of a piece that pays homage to the past, lives in the present, and looks toward the future. Through this, I hope the work creates a push and pull that nods to the history of still life and the feeling of place and personality, while still leaving room for interpretation.
Tara: The objects I choose are already doing a lot of work culturally. They come loaded with associations that I’m counting on the viewer to bring. I pick things that I know are charged, and I trust that charge to land. The bow around the book creates a definite tension. It’s soft, decorative, even gift-like, but it encloses a narrative that might be intense or culturally loaded. A title like Psycho carries very different weight than how it’s presented.I’m interested in setting up a structure that invites a certain kind of looking. Text gives the viewer something immediate to hold onto, but it doesn’t dictate meaning.
For the paintings The End and Screw U, the slippers made by Stubbs & Wootton carry a very specific cultural signal. They evoke an old-school preppy aesthetic and a world of quiet status and inherited taste. But then the text says, “Screw U” or “The End,” and suddenly that proper object has a completely different energy. The slippers are positioned so they can be read almost like a conversation. That interaction between the refined and the irreverent is where a lot of the humor and bite in the work lives. I like making something familiar suddenly looked at differently, where the viewer can enter into dialogue with it and allow the work to evolve alongside them.
Michaela: These bodies of work capture a sense of artificial stillness, scenes drawn from everyday life that feel slightly surreal, uncertain, or suspended. Is that sense of stillness something you’re consciously constructing, or does it emerge more intuitively as you work? If not surreal, what language feels more accurate to describe that atmosphere: heightened reality, distortion, tension?
Tara Lewis, The End, 2026. Oil on linen, 24 x 18 in.
Tara: The stillness is intentional. I isolate the object, simplify the composition, and control the light so it feels slightly suspended or held in place. The bow contributes to that — it literally binds the object, creating a sense of delay. Text plays into this as well. Something like The End suggests closure, but the painting holds it in a fixed, unresolved state. The objects are familiar and grounded, but when presented this way, they shift from functional to symbolic, carrying attitude and identity rather than just use.
I also paint many portraits, and I think that shows up in these paintings of objects. In a sense, they are portraits of objects. They are posed, they have presence, and they’re asking to be looked at directly. There’s an exchange happening that feels similar to what happens when painting a person or in a great fashion photograph, where an object or figure is lit and framed in a way that gives it an almost uncomfortable amount of presence.
I think the stillness also has something to do with familiarity pushed slightly past comfort. You recognize what you’re looking at, but the attention being paid to it feels disproportionate, and that gap is where the tension lives.
Teddy: Artificial stillness is a great way to put it. All of the subject matter in my work was put there by someone or has a strong human influence behind it, yet there is no life. Time has been spent and invested, things have happened, place settings are left behind, cars are left for scrap, yet there is neither life nor death. I intentionally do this to leave the opportunity for the viewer to create their own story, almost like a film still. I try to show that there is still some life within these images and compositions. Specifically, the push and pull created through distortion, tension, abundance, and absence are some of the emotions I’m looking to achieve throughout my work.
Michaela: You are both teachers of fine art. How does teaching, where you engage with how others see, interpret, and make images, feed back into your own practice? Has it shifted the way you think about meaning or authorship in your work?
Teddy: Teaching has influenced my work much more recently than in years past. I teach a freshman technical drawing class that explores designing houses in two-point perspective. This recent body of work, Green House Blue Prints, is directly influenced by looking at a multitude of drafts and blueprints from my students.
Through teaching this unit, it allowed me to examine perspective in my own work, take it as more of a literal definition — a mental view or prospect, a literal scene — and apply this to still life.
Tara: Teaching is a huge part of how I stay connected to what’s happening culturally. Alongside my studio practice, I am a Professor of Art at an old New England prep school made up of students from all over the world who have grown up entirely within digital media culture. Watching how they see, what they respond to, and what they find strange, funny, or moving is endlessly informative. So much of what I paint draws a line to coming of age: the books, films, fashion imagery, and objects that mark the threshold between innocence and experience. Teaching keeps that territory alive and immediate for me. I’m surrounded by people navigating that moment in real time.
Teaching has also made me much more aware of the many ways an image can be read. In critiques, you see how quickly meaning expands beyond the artist’s intent. When a student brings a completely fresh take on an image with no art historical baggage or received opinion, it can shift how I think. That generational dialogue keeps my motivations alive and my eye honest.
There’s also a real hunger for the tangible in a world of scrolling and screens. My paintings are very much a response to that — the physicality of paint, the realness of the object, the book cover as artifact rather than thumbnail. Teaching has sharpened my sense of why that matters.
--------------------------------------------
View Cover Story at Abigail Ogilvy Gallery (Los Angeles) through May 30, 2026.
Written by Michaela Dehning.
Add a comment