Tad Beck / Diana Cherbuliez at THEODORE:Art
January 11– February 24, 2013
RECEPTION Friday January 11, 6-9 PM.
GALLERY HOURS FRIDAY-SUNDAY 1-6 PM
Theodore:Art is pleased to present a joint exhibition of work by Tad Beck and Diana Cherbuliez. Beck and Cherbuliez have both maintained studios on Vinalhaven, Maine for over twenty years. Their shared experience of making work in an isolated island community has led to a deep and productive exchange of ideas and a longstanding friendship, and this is the first exhibition to present the strategies that unite their singular practices.
Beck makes photographs, videos, and installations that probe queer history, the photographic moment, physical exertion, and the abstract body. His photographs reveal an optical tension that magnifies the camera’s ability to capture multiple historical and contemporary moments in a single image, often through Beck’s decision to photograph and re-photograph a single image using a variety of photographic media and techniques. His videos couple futile physical tasks of an athletic nature with technical manipulation to create absurd situations that, through repetition, become meditations on embodied experience and the role of the camera in observing and shaping it.
Cherbuliez’s sculptures and video works are deeply invested in transforming collected materials through labor-intensive techniques into powerful objects that manifest public and private obsessions. Subject, media, and method overlap, giving form to the in-between states/places where the mind and eyes wander. Structures of transition, like ladders and bridges, are crafted with salvaged building materials, abject materials like human hair and teeth, and the specific detritus of her life. The result is a materialization of the ambiguity of routine passages such as the drift between consciousness and sleep. Her work is both conceptual and rooted in the poetry of materials – their specific physical beauty, history, allusions, and metaphors.
Whether drawing on Eakins or Jackass, Freud or folk tales, Beck and Cherbuliez push artistic and cultural traditions in new directions. They deliberately and allusively draw on a host of reference points, offering viewers the opportunity to enter the work and find their own meanings. Both embrace the challenge and peril of mastering their chosen media; both are invested in the value of labor, artistic and otherwise; both seek, and know the value of, hard-won elegance.
THEODORE:Art
56 Bogart Street
Brooklyn, NY 11206
theodoreart.com
