Benjamin Timpson

The artist Benjamin Timpson’s use of deconstructed and intricately overlapped butterfly wings as a medium of portraiture presents his subjects as woven from the complex materials of memory, nature, metamorphosis, and survival. In 2017, after a DNA test confirmed his family’s generationally-concealed Puebloan ancestry, and a close relative was badly beaten by her boyfriend, Timpson began making portraits of Indigenous women, a population that is disproportionately affected by violence and homicide.

Timpson’s portraits of those who have been affected by violence is both a means of increasing awareness of this problem, and a way to return agency to the women he portrays: in the transcendent meanings and shifting patterns of the wings of a butterfly, Timpson’s subjects are both ephemeral and radiant with lived humanity.  Working from photographs given to him by the subjects or their family members, or found in databases of missing women, Timpson uses magnification and precision tools to arrange compositions of the responsibly-sourced wings against arduino-controlled light boxes, and also develops stunning large-format photographs of the original collages.

Homero Gómez González (2025) depicts Michoacan logger turned butterfly activist who went missing, and was later found murdered, on the El Rosario Monarch Butterfly Preserve, a component of the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve. Gómez González founded the Preserve when, after generations of family logging, he recognized the terrible impact of deforestation on the monarch butterflies that winter in his home of El Rosario. Natural–and human–capacity for change is exemplified in Timpson’s portrait and in Gómez González’s life, as well as the material used: butterfly wings have the unique biological capability to shift hues, both transmitting and reflecting light.