Till October 26 in Studio Museum Harlem.
I want my spot back (performance), 2012.
About:
As a sculptor, Kevin Beasley (1985, Lynchburg, Virginia) tends to make artifacts of the culture that surrounds him. He ties old, shredded T-shirts into compact bundles; he smears tar; he pours liquid foam into makeshift molds, fashioned from shoes, to arrive at elegant, vase-like forms. Beasley carries these collected pieces—a trash-can liner, for example—around for years until they’re worn from age and handling. For a short time, he forwent having a physical studio space and making sculpture, but his practice eventually returned to his accretion of art materials—including a cumbrous cotton-gin motor that he hauled from Alabama—all of which now fill a storage unit he rents in Connecticut. “It’s really hard for me to totally abandon something,” he says, “unless it’s completely spent. And by then it’s probably a sculpture.”
Katies, 2014.
Beasley is also a longtime musician—most often a drummer—and his sound art emerged from a quasi-sculptural interest in the physical materiality of analog tape and reel-to-reel players. Last year he performed in the MoMA’s atrium as a kind of DJ, remixing and screwing a cappella tracks by deceased rappers (including Guru, ODB, Eazy-E, Biggie Smalls) into a menacing sonic soup he titled I Want My Spot Back.
(from Interview Magazine, October 2014)
Ain’t it, 2014.
“(…)I am mainly doing sculptures, but sound for me is just as physical, tactile and experiential as any other material, and there is also an equal amount of play, if not more. With this piece, sound was being translated into another kind of material and then came back out through this very physical experience; through dancing, through reverberations in the floor and the wall. I find this very interesting because it’s another material I can use to help understand myself and my environment: where am I located, where are other people located in relationship to me? It helps me bridge social aspects, like “how can I understand someone else through this kind of material?” and “how can they understand me through it?” For me, this gets into art making in general.”
Untitled (Jumped Man), 2014.
Courtesy: Casey Kaplan Gallery New York
Movement I (performance), 2014.
Photo Sebastian Kim.