Strange shapes. Thick whorls of paint. Photos of everyday objects like dumpsters or movers’ dollies set within a canvas and covered over by layers of paint. "Outside the Drift," an exhibition of works by John Beech, on view September 7 - 29, 2018, resembles nothing so much as a walk through a museum of artifacts from some unknown and yet hauntingly familiar culture.
Whether it is the built up layers of paint Beech uses to underscore paint as material or the the studio found objects that hold a record of years of art-making like objects from some archeological dig – Beech brings a practical and utilitarian aesthetic into his pieces. Here we have perhaps an inversion of the Dadaist manifesto of elucidating and elevating the everyday as art. Instead Beech demystifies the elevated status of art-making by showing us its everyday roots, its nuts and bolts and scraps. In both cases, the end result is art which, ideally, leads the viewer one step closer to the ground, to the material insistence of reality.
