Rachel Beach "Towers and Portals"
Like the Spice
This event has ended.
Situated firmly in the border between sculpture and painting, illusion and reality, masculine and feminine, representation, abstraction and decoration, Rachel Beach's wooden portals and towers are crafted around cultural and biological limits. By playing painted illusion against sculptural reality each sculpture/painting creates a crisis of perception, an irresolvable tension between what you see and what is possible.
Conceptually the works are also situated in fertile cultural gaps, frustrating expectations. The portals take literally the idea of a painting as a window, framing a section of wall or empty space in the gallery as if the works themselves only existed as complicated borders, casting confusing shadows, as if the arrival of the everyday was announced by a full orchestra. The towers are architectural but can also seem at times like freestanding ornament, as though a monument had become only the detail, as if a person was only made of skin. All of the sculptures do in fact have two layers of skin, one of wood veneer and another of paint.
The works have a very complicated relationship with decoration, siting it in another wilderness, the one between abstraction and representation. What at first seems like a carved filigree, turns out to be a flat painting, a row of stripes, a complicated set of edges, decoration becomes structure and vice versa. They are sculptures of paintings and paintings of sculptures. These works make it seem possible to collage reality and carve an idea.
Media
Schedule
from March 07, 2009 to April 12, 2009
Closing Reception on 2009-04-12 from 18:30 to 20:00