Kim Beck
Sunday, 26 April 2009
Work from Site I Works (new developments, space available, there, and tree islands).
Much of Beck’s work makes reference to stereoscopic vision, both literally and conceptually, in a way that makes one consider her work as a metacritique of artistic interpretation. I am a huge fan of this work, and I am thrilled to have come across it, and I think Robert Adams would love this work.
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New Developments: Modeled after turn-of-the-century stereocards, this series of debossed Iris prints documents the interior and exterior spaces of the growing suburbs southeast of Denver, Colorado.
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Space Available: At first glance, this sculpture appears to be the silhouetted framework of an actual billboard. In fact, the piece is flat. Cut from a perspectival drawing and built like a theatrical stage set, it creates a disorienting illusion that flattens out as one passes by. While fairly large, the piece is nonetheless a subtle addition to the industrialist-mansion-turned-art-center; it nags at the peripheral vision of the passerby, who tries to remember if it had been there previously, who may see it simply as a naked billboard, and not as a residual industrial object descended atop a formal 17th-Century Carolean-inspired building. A companion piece invites viewers to take a souvenir postcard of a blank billboard, both inviting them to dream into its empty advertising space and memorializing their visit to the exterior site, turning a peripheral, non-event into one to remember.
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There: In this portfolio of aquatint etchings, lightposts, signs, billboards and street furniture become stark silhouettes, signalling the absence of their context. Isolated, they suggest a familiar if unspecified place, or even props for an empty stage set.
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Tree Islands: Whether evidence of nature’s struggle against a growing asphalt sea or a developer’s attempt to prevent a driver’s dizzying fear of wide-open spaces, the islands of trees growing in parking lots accumulate in this body of work into discreetly parceled urban forests particularly in a series of graphite and cut drawings on paper. In other pieces, graphite hand cut drawings on mylyar that float directly on the wall, or in laser-etched prints, they appear isolated in solitary moments of focus – the cracks in their cement barriers, the awkwardness of untrimmed growth revealing a hidden pressure on expectations of the neat controlled world of the parking lot.