Image: Lisa Sette Gallery, Phoenix
Lisa Sette Gallery’s summer newsletter spotlights Benjamin Timpson, whose portrait practice uses deconstructed butterfly wings to build images that address memory, nature, metamorphosis and survival. The gallery’s material on the artist frames the works as both formally intricate and socially urgent, with portraits of Indigenous women and a recent image of butterfly activist Homero Gómez González among the examples highlighted in Newsletter Volume 24.
In the gallery’s presentation, Timpson’s work is rooted in a 2017 turning point: after a DNA test confirmed his family’s generationally concealed Puebloan ancestry, and after a close relative was badly beaten by her boyfriend, he began making portraits of Indigenous women. The newsletter says this body of work responds to the disproportionate rates of violence and homicide affecting Indigenous women while also returning agency to the women portrayed.
Timpson’s method combines hand-built collage with photographic and digital processes. According to the gallery text, he works from photographs given to him by the subjects or their family members, or from databases of missing women, then uses magnification and precision tools to arrange responsibly sourced butterfly wings against Arduino-controlled light boxes. He also develops large-format photographs of the original collages, extending the work beyond the constructed object itself.
The newsletter’s featured image, 'Lorena' (2026), is listed as a butterfly collage made with butterfly wings on glass, wood and electrical components, and framed within a custom programmable LED light panel. The gallery describes Timpson’s portraiture as presenting its subjects as woven from the complex materials of memory, nature, metamorphosis and survival, using the shifting patterns of butterfly wings to suggest both ephemerality and lived humanity.
A second work, 'Homero Gómez González' (2025), is described in the artist page as a portrait of the Michoacan logger turned butterfly activist who went missing and was later found murdered at the El Rosario Monarch Butterfly Preserve, part of the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve. The gallery notes that Gómez González founded the preserve after recognizing the impact of deforestation on monarch butterflies that winter in his home of El Rosario.
The newsletter text ties the portrait to the material it uses, noting that butterfly wings have the biological capacity to shift hues, both transmitting and reflecting light. In that framing, the work joins biological change with cultural narrative, presenting portraiture as a form that can hold grief, activism and resilience in the same surface.
Timpson appears in Lisa Sette Gallery’s Newsletter Volume 24 alongside artists including Sonya Clark, Ala Ebtekar, Duane Michals, Jan Maarten Voskuil, Sam Frésquez, Ato Ribeiro, Binh Danh, Timothy Horn, Xawery Wolski and Julianne Swartz. Lisa Sette Gallery is located at 210 East Catalina Drive in Phoenix, Arizona, with gallery hours listed as Tuesday through Friday from 10am to 4pm and Saturday from 11am to 4pm.
