Art in America
Kim Beck / Center for the Arts Review by Leigh Anne Miller
February 07
As part of the reward for being named the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts’ Emerging Artist for 2006, Kim Beck got to install an expansive body of thematically related work in a variety of mediums there. Beck, who teaches at Carnegie Mellon University, used a cluster of three galleries to display a foam-and-cardboard wall installation, a series of charcoal drawings, cutout paper constructions and a hand-drawn animation. The works all stem from a long-running interest in the architecture of the suburban landscape, highway travel and other symbols of contemporary middle-American life.
Most of Beck’s work sticks to a black-and-white palette, so the glow emanating from the room-size installation Holymoley Land (2006) was a visual shock. Against the back wall, she built up overlapping layers of hot-pink insulation foam cut into shapes appropriate for a board game about road trips: billboards, highway overpasses, fast-food marquees, road signs, etc. Holymoley Land reached almost to the ceiling and then sloped down to the floor, where these ubiquitous yet easily overlooked emblems of transient existence were heaped one on top of the other, as in a landfill – or a livelier, more whimsical Louise Nevelson assemblage. The rest of the piece was subtler, with similar shapes in shadowlike cardboard much more sparsely populating the far ends of two facing walls. In some places, pencil outlines peeked out behind gangly lampposts, giving the work an air of neglect that matched the abandoned lots illustrated in the works in the adjacent gallery.
A series of 13 geometric charcoal-on-paper drawings, each numbered and titled Thing (all 2006, 30 x 44 inches), come from the same sources that inspired Holymoley Land. They include blocky images of empty filling stations, strands of triangular, used-car-lot flags and clumps of overgrown weeds. In Thing #10, two towers of crooked, stacked signs of the kind you might find at the entrance to a strip mall are cut out and “superimposed” over parallel intersecting power lines. The less figurative works in this series resemble some of Barry Le Va’s recent drawings.
Most of the work in a third gallery narrows Beck’s focus to one particular variety of the semi-urban space: the long-term storage locker. The largest and most intricate is Cut Storage (2005), a four-panel horizontal spread, with each panel consisting of two or three sheets of paper layered one on top of the other. The basic architecture of a storage shed, as seen from dozens of angles, is cut out from each sheet of paper. Beck’s construction challenges the structural simplicity of the generic storage shed with a dizzying depth and complexity that do justice to its function as a garbage dump for accumulated personal effects. On the same subject is Ideal Cities (2004-05; also the name of Beck’s Web site), a three-minute hand-drawn animation that unfolds like a live version of Cut Storage. A storage shed is drawn again and again, like an over-active Etch-a-Sketch. The best sequence begins just as a tangle of frantically drawn lines have formed a complete shed, at which point the drawing process reverses and the mess is cleaned up by being slowly erased.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Art Review: Kim Beck by Mary Thomas (excerpt)
October 11, 2006
Beck addresses the inhabited landscape, ignoring classical and picturesque elements to concentrate on the banal scenery one navigates while going about daily living.
Sometimes her observations are reductive and stark, as with the graphic series titled "Thing," in which meticulous, large charcoal drawings use as points of departure such items as road signs and power lines. Rather than representationally presenting them, though, Beck provides sufficient information for recognition but alters it, coaxing the effort required to connect the dots between what's visually provided and what's mentally stored.
Other works are almost manic, such as "Holymoley Land," a cacophony of signs, street lamps and architecture, cut from bright pink insulation foam and brown cardboard, that occupies three walls. The objects appear frenzied -- stacked and competitive for space -- the urban equivalent of a rain forest.
Throughout, this exhibition is about drawing and line. Inherent in the cutouts, line also appears among them as marks on the walls. While essential to the works on paper in a supporting role, line is the featured character in an animation, "Ideal City," its alacrity a confirmation of the energy one suspects Beck applies while working.
The lack of figures in Beck's work, which so blatantly references congestion and populated areas, conveys an apocalyptic tone.
Within the positive/negative gas station of "Thing," is there commentary about energy and oil and war? Within the multiples of the "Self Storage" series, is there commentary about the conspicuous consumption or the ever-mobile society that spawned them? Does the amalgam of signage that engulfs the occasional tree reflect environmental concerns?
Whatever her intent, Beck provides fodder for a lively consideration of a world one frequently moves through only unconsciously.
artnet
Drawing Notebook by N.F. Karlins (excerpt)
July 04
…definitely someone to watch. As is Plane Space’s artist-in-residence, Kim Beck. Her Self-Storage is two long sheets of paper that unroll down a wall in parallel. Reiterated long, low storage building units expand and contract in graphite on the paper sheets and on the walls. Some are cut from the paper scrolls and seem to have escaped and begun reproducing on the gallery walls. Eerie. Buildings as bunnies.
Contemporary Magazine
Memphis by Bill Anthes (excerpt)
Summer 04
Night: Memphis by Kim Beck – a temporary, outdoor video projection (at the Brooks Museum) of sultry exurban spaces, streetlights haloed by swarming insects, accompanied by the din of jet aircraft landing, which fills summer evenings here.
The Commercial Appeal, Memphis, TN
MAX: 03, curated by Beth Venn by Jon W. Sparks (excerpt)
July 20, 2003
Kim Beck, director of the graduate studies program at Memphis College of Art, has a series of what at first resembles five Doric columns made of partially unrolled paper. The rolls are actually milk-carton paper, and the still rolled-up tops soon begin to suggest rollup garage doors the kind you find at thousands of commercial storage facilities sprouting all over.
The classical architectural spin on this most common of functional buildings is a witty take. Beck then projected pictures of storage facilities and cut them out from the paper rolls or used a straight-edge to render exactingly in graphite the characterless structures, sometimes on the paper, sometimes going off onto the wall.
“I started getting interested when, coming into the Memphis airport, I saw a sign saying it was the distribution center of America,” Beck said. “There are so many storage facilities created for individuals and corporations of things not ready. It speaks to how much stuff we accumulate and have to put in these weird nonspaces that all the same: basic and cheap as possible."
Artvoice
Reworking Concepts of Beauty by Cynnie Gaasch (excerpt)
July 10 – 16, 2003
Subtlety often allows the average to evolve. Kim Beck’s three works come together in an installation titled “Climate Controlled, “ which smartly uses technology and gracefully unfolds into an evocative work of art. At first glance, a floor rug and handheld video monitors are, well, unimpressive. What calls for further investigation are the simply drawn architectural renderings of drive-up storage rental spaces. Overlapping, they become stately as they wrap around a corner and a door in the gallery space. These drawings require you to step around the rug, which nearly fills the floor of the gallery. Walking down the two-foot space allows you time to recognize the strangeness of a stark digital image of an airplane and power lines printed onto an industrial grade carpet.
Strange and lovely, the slightly reflective and rough surface of the rug is as evocative as many paintings, and you can’t help but feel like you’d like to fall into the sky of the image. Rewardign you for the trip down the narrow space are two identical digital video loops, each 10 seconds in length, showing on wall mounted, handheld digital televisions. Here, Beck again captures the ordinary to create beauty. A cloud blossoms upward over and over again, framed by telephone poles, wires and streetlight. Altogether, the room becomes a tribute to our everyday world and elevates it to a space for reflection.
Art Papers
Memphis / Drive by David Hall
October 2002
“Drive” (Second Floor Contemporary Gallery, March 1-April 5, 2002), a suite of drawings and video installations by KIM BECK, considers society’s mediations of reality, especially relative to the contemporary landscape’s increasing superficiality and dull homogeneity. Unbridled consumerism and suburban sprawl, hastened by escalating population growth and advances in communication and transportation, transform once sovereign and distinct regions into carbon copies of each other. As in Beck’s prior work, each location represented, whether a parking lot, golf course or housing development, is a veritable “anytown-USA,” personifying a transposable ideal more so than a specific place.
The artist’s mode of representation, always twice removed from the source, accentuates further the notion of copy and model, manifesting as image duplication or short, seamless video looks. Beck’s drawings adopt the format of the stereograph, a nineteenth center precursor to the Viewmaster that consists of a pair of near-identical pictures, one next to the other, to give the illusion of three dimensionality. The artist utilizes this orientation to develop image prototypes and their doppelgangers. Sprinklers (2001), the curbside perspective of a cookie-cutter housing development rendered monotonous next to its facsimile, mirrors what the Situationist Guy Debord dubbed “banalization,” the unification of virtual and physical space by self-replicating production and growth, which ultimately destroys “the autonomy and quality of places.”
The omnipresence of public utilities, franchises, malls, bullboards, suburbs, etc. in the built environment habituates one to their presence, such that, while modern life may be inundated with events mediated by images (Debord’s “spectacle”), they often go unrecognized. Lights (2001), depicting a majestic sky at dusk filled with roiling clouds, approaches the sublime, but a lonely utility pole on the horizon returns it to earth. The image is seen from the freeway, a perspective that most commuters would find too prosaic to grant a second look; but Beck finds harmony between natural environment and human infrastructure.
Beck repeats, abridges or obfuscates her judiciously rendered, even delicate, representations to reinforce their reading as signs, as reality’s appearance rather than its essence. When a drawing is obscured by gesso or erased, the image displaces its source; the attenuated remains of the picture function metaphorically as a fading memory or an articulation of nostalgia. The video Flag Wave (2002) seemingly captures the tranquil sight of a vacant putting green where nothing ever happens, but one realizes it consists of a perpetual one-minute loop. In this regard, the artist’s mode of representation typifies what Jean Baudrillard describes as the “liquidation of referentials… substituting signs of the real for the real itself.”
Baudrillard and Umberto Eco have labeled a representation that maintains no correlation to consensual reality yet tangentially refers to something real as a “hyper-reality.” The experience of Fairway Walk (2002), a video projected through a bank of twenty-five droning box fans onto a wall, demonstrates the capacity of mediated structures to define perceptions of reality. Approaching the video of a lush golf course, one sympathetically absorbs the fans’ gusts of air and the sight of swaying branches as a single taste, a surrogate reality shaped by various forms of mass media, especially television and movies, where the image overpowers its referent.
The present age is dominated more than every by forces endeavoring to control representation, an attitude encompassing all facets of human affairs, including technology, economics, politics and media. Beck’s contemplations of image and mimesis (also on view at the Houston community College Annex Gallery September 26-October 17, 2002) underscore the fact that they are, in the end, socially constructed realities; and furthermore, moot.