The vast pre -gallery of the drawing center can get the most attention, but the smaller back space and the lower level have organized many quietly intriguing exhibitions. Ericka Beckman: Power of the Spin Is such a show.
Although Beckman, best known as a filmmaker, is often associated with the Generate photosShe became in the 1970s at the California Institute of the Arts in the midst of a more unstructured experimentalism. The distinction is subtle, but it has resulted in an oeuvre that shares the fascination of the New York Group for mediated images, but shifts the focus of their emphasis on deconstruction and authorship in a capitalist atmosphere to the archetypes and stories that makes us absorb images that are more typical, of her Calarts.
Power of the spider consists mainly of drawings regarding Beckman’s films, from sketches and storyboards to extensive scenarios that are displayed in saturated shades, such as “Power of the Spin (You the Better)” (1982), with a kind of roulette wheel in the middle of a body of water, surrounded by people who escapes the benefit. A study for her short film ‘You the Better’ from 1983 with fellow artist Ashley Bickerton, the drawing combines Beckman’s interest in chance games with the possibility (or illusion) of human freedom of choice.
Visually, the schematic images are closer to Russian structivism and even some of the metaphysical paintings of Giorgio de Chirico than to everything from the 1980s New York: In many drawings, face-free, automatic figures that are recorded by a Machine Linies-the Coolal Drawing “Cooloal Drawing” Cooloal Drawing “Coolaal Drawing” (1985) Portraits a character are repaired or, more likely, in the course of the machine, in a machine, in the course of a machine, during a machine while a machine is affected, in a machine, in the course of a machine. Contrast with the stiffness of the bodies.
However, the highlight of the show is Beckman’s film “Stalk” (2023). Here lively color and controlled movement come to life in a renewed view of Jack and the Beanstalk This criticizes our current corporatized agricultural industry, according to the website of the drawing center, but with a pronounced surrealistic aesthetics.
Live presented on Performa 2021, the film places farmers side by side with which together with large stock market scenes and, the most striking, the towering bean stable itself. With a skyscraper in Manhattan in the background, Jack the bean stable, sometimes clamps for life, climbs a dancer like a personalized sprout à la Cirque de Soleil, who beckons him.
It may sound on paper, but Beckman has a fantastic vision that leans in humor and the grotesque. Ultimately, human behavior is the core of her work – even within abstract social systems we can still find ourselves.
Ericka Beckman: Power of the Spin will take place in the drawing center (35 Wooster Street, Soho, Manhattan) until 11 May. The exhibition was organized by Claire Gilman with Isabella Kapur.
