The Stephen and George Laundry Line is excited to announce a new installation by Kim Beck, on view October 17 - November 16, 2016. Beck’s work spans a variety of media from drawing to installation, looking at ignored landscapes - the outskirts, the suburban, the peripheral - and the changes that take place there. Her often large-scale but sometimes intimate works give a sense of exploration through an everyday environment. She has used skywriting planes to convey messages of a broken economy, made meticulous drawings of half-finished construction sites, life-size silhouettes of billboards, a field guide to weeds, and many other projects which reflect the human influence on the land.
In this installation, Barrier, bright orange safety fencing is wrapped around the line, suggesting security and construction activities in the usual place of laundry. Here however the fencing is no longer functional. Instead this subtly transformed readymade material seems to have floated up off the street, allowing us to consider it as either a fence dividing space or as a layered abstraction. Overlapping grids of orange and silver morph into a painting of sorts forming a disorienting moiré pattern. Over the course of the installation, the weather will rip and tear at the grid, gradually changing piece and further pointing to it's failure as a fence.
Kim Beck is an artist who lives in Pittsburgh where she is an Associate Professor in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University. Her work has been shown widely, including at the Walker Art Center, Carnegie Museum of Art, Smack Mellon, Socrates Sculpture Park, Warhol Museum, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Omi Sculpture Park, Hallwalls and on the High Line in NYC. Her work has been reviewed in Art in America and the New York Times among others. She has been a fellow at such places as the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Art Omi, Cannonball, Helsinki International Artist Programme, Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program, International Studio & Curatorial Program, and Cité Internationale des Arts. Her work is included in the collections of Agnes Gund, the Philbrook Museum of Art, the Minneapolis Museum of Art, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum among others. She has received awards from ARS Electronica, the Studio for Creative Inquiry, Pollock-Krasner, Heinz Foundation, Sprout Fund, Pittsburgh Foundation, Thomas J. Watson Foundation and Printed Matter.
image caption: Kim Beck, "Drive By," charcoal on paper, 6 ft x 16 ft. 2001