Jarrod Beck: Strike Slip
May 16–August 31, 2013
Artist talk: August 15, 7pm
Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts
724 South 12th Street
Omaha, NE 68102
T 402 341 7130
kim [at] bemiscenter.org
The Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts is proud to announce that the evolving exhibition of work by Jarrod Beck, a recent Bemis Center resident, will enter its final phase with Beck’s Art Talk on August 15 at 7pm. Beck’s sprawling, architectural-scale installations emerge from a highly physical, elegant drawing process. For this exhibition, Beck created singular environments that entwine evocatively repurposed mass accumulations of building materials with the architecture of the galleries. The installation process for this exhibition has continued throughout its duration—a progression that forms a critical aspect of the work.
With materials including wood flooring, newsprint rolls, black rubber roofing, Hydrocal plaster, PVC pipe and rough framing lumber, Beck generated an uncertain, shifting terrain that alludes to geologic and architectural forces, and reifies both the history of the building and its site. Beck’s process is a hybrid of his dual history working as an architect and a printmaker. Here, the intentional line holds equal weight to generative and accidental marks. Beck has both expanded the act of printmaking to the scale of the building, and broken architecture down to its core parts. There is rich detail in the layers of his work—gashed paper rolls, seared wood, charred and flayed skins, chalky strata and warbling light casts.
Viewers also have a hand in the work. Their movements, weight and presence in the galleries have produced large-scale forms of printmaking. Collectively, these marks contribute to the fundamental tension of the exhibition—the push of accumulation against the pull of excavation.
Strike Slip also highlights ongoing synergies between the Bemis Center’s international artist-in-residence and exhibitions programs, and connects the testing ground of Beck’s residency to the ongoing public experimentation that characterizes his exhibition. After the initial opening, Beck has returned throughout the summer, with new material, and reformed the spaces to produce wholly new experiences of the exhibition. Beck’s August 15 Art Talk marks the beginning of the final phase of the exhibition’s evolution.
Strike Slip fully alters the gallery space and our experience of that space and reveals Beck’s process in real time. Only through repeated visits may one access the complex textures, sense-fields and emotional depth charge of the exhibition.
Strike Slip is organized by the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts and curated by Hesse McGraw.
About the artist
Jarrod Beck lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. His drawings are in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art and he has created installations at the Socrates Sculpture Park, the South Street Seaport Museum, Lawndale Center, Cape Cod National Seashore and Provincetown Art Museum. In June 2010, he began a permanent installation on five acres of land in the Chihuahuan Desert near Terlingua, Texas. He is a 2013 Smack Mellon “Hot Picks” artist and received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant for a residency at the Vermont Studio Center. He has participated in residencies at MacDowell Colony, Fine Arts Work Center, Robert Blackburn Print Workshop, Lower East Side Printshop, Siena Art Institute and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.
About the Bemis Center
Through its internationally recognized residency program, the Bemis Center provides critical time and space to outstanding artists who are working at the cutting edge of contemporary practice. Jane Alexander, the former head of the National Endowment for the Arts, has called the Bemis Center “one of the great treasures of its kind in the country,” and ArtInfo has recognized the Bemis Center as one of the “Top 10 residency programs around the globe.”
The Bemis Center serves the international artistic community by inviting artists from around the world to spend up to three months in Omaha in spacious live/work studios experimenting with the conceptual and material bases of their artistic practices. The work-in-process that is part of the residency experience is made visible to Omaha residents and visitors through the Bemis Center’s “cutting-edge exhibitions” (The New York Times).
Exhibitions presenting sponsor: Omaha Steaks