Walead Beshty: Production Stills
13 Oct - 14 Nov 2009

Thomas Dane Gallery is pleased to announce the first London exhibition of LA-based artist Walead Beshty. Beshty's photograms and sculptures explore the nature of both the production and consumption of contemporary art. Only giving aesthetic sensibilities the briefest attention, Beshty is more preoccupied with how the art is made, and how this is evident in the work itself. His monumental photograms incorporate the camera-less, negative-less photographic process forged by early twentieth century artists Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray, who produced their work by placing an object on photosensitive paper before exposing it. In a modern variation, Beshty uses new technologies such as colour processing and large-scale printers, creating unique images by folding, curling and shaping photographic paper and exposing it to different intensities of light. Beshty has also famously left the image-making to chance when he brought photographic paper through x-rays machines at airport security. With a similar concern for subverting the customary systems of art-production and a continuous reflection on commerce, and the production and dissemination of images and objects, Beshty has worked on various series of 'Fedex Sculptures' since 2005. Originally made with shatterproof glass, the sculptures are designed to fit inside a standard FedEx box. Just as the photograms are material representations of the process of their creation, each journey of a FedEx box leaves its memory on the glass; Cracks and impacts all become part of the sculpture. The process of making the sculptures begins in earnest when FedEx is used in lieu of a professional art shippers to transport the work between artists studio and exhibition space. The more recent FedEx boxes on show are made of copper, and shipped unprotected so their physical journey is even more directly recorded on their surface. Walead Beshty was born in London in 1976 and now lives and works in Los Angeles. He completed his MFA at Yale University School of Art in 2002, and his BA Hons at Bard College in New York in 1999. The artist has exhibited widely in the New York and London, including the Tate Britain, London and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, both in 2009. He also exhibited most recently at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

 

Press Release

With both a sharp and laconic aesthetic sensibility
Beshty creates a photography of uncertainty

Cutting across several media, including photograms
a representative example of the range of Beshty's program

a punchy reminder from the 30-year-old formalist
the London born, Los Angeles based sculptor and photo-anachronist

is interested in images, as all photographers must be
soft shades of turquoise, lavender, lemon yellow, rose and grey, are especially lovely

Beshty inserts himself into the historical flow
But beware of the theoretical undertow

Clever if somewhat vague referents
presented as a subtly posed but effective arguments

read as luminous abstract compositions
created with very clear prescriptions

Beshty has included within the exhibition
an assistant who toils like an art-world Rumpelstiltskin

This piece by Walead Beshty is briefly amusing
An accident that suggested the idea of deliberately using

A revised concept of site specificity, now proposed as a function
Investigating systems of dispersal and production

Beshty's also keen to let us know about the real
the fact of photographic capture seems to verify and seal

The careful choices abstract art was supposed to be about
risk some dumbing-down, or prettying-out

His darkroom assistant or a dealer or the artist Karl Haendel
Beshty shows all but does not tell

gorgeous new color photograms are the star attraction
easily moving between complex, camera-less abstraction

To the world of assembly line commodities
in the form of blurred lines and hazy irregularities

Quasi-minimalist sculpture that could also be classified as mail art
And if that's what they easily become, is it what they were from the start?

Of the show's relaxed attitude toward lines of demarcation
which, sexy as it sounded, felt like little more than rhetorical lubrication
As did Beshty's emphasis on facticity - his unabashed fetishization
Here flashy surface need not come at the cost of art historical, conceptual, and socio-political elaboration.

it is a fact that makes his work difficult to unravel at a glance
produced not by conscious compositional decisions, but rather by chance

conventional presentation extends to the official press release for the show
As if Rene Magritte hadn't already claimed "The Treachery of Images" as a title 80 years ago.

-V.A., A.B., C.B, C.B., P.E., J.W.G., K.J., D.K., J.K., C.M, D.M., S.M.M., J.R., J.S., R.S., D.V., S.P., M.K., C.K., S.N.S., H.M., J.P (2002-2009)