Montserrat Benito Segura's political concerns achieve powerful and poetic expression in her visually lush photographs of real-world objects which she transforms into powerful commentaries. Her work plunges us into color-rich, often surreal scenarios involving such innocuous items as dinner plates, world maps, marbles, books, and shoes and converts them into potent social critiques on the world and its perpetuation of injustice, suffering and war. When she shows us an actual handgun, the deep brown of the weapon on a pale background is a stark testimonial. The human foot also carries an especially strong presence in Montserrat Benito's work: a footprint or an empty shoe serves as remembrance of an absent one, children forgotten by society or those of lost identities and displaced homes.

Whether the loss conveyed in her work is personal or political is left unsaid. That is where Montserrat Benito's art touches us, where we are unable to (and need not) make such distinctions, and we feel the pain of the world's political woes as deeply as our own.