November 23rd 2007 – January 19th 2008
Exhibition opening: Thursday 22nd November, 6-9pm

Beasley’s work moves between sculpture and photography. Its subject matter is largely composed of autobiographical recollections mediated through literary references. Aesthetically it engages in a questioning of the relations between hand made objects and their (re-) presentation as photographic objects. Her practice is at times oneiric, but bears equal references to surrealism as to minimalism. Beasley’s work deals with death and anxiety, using elements from the visual and the literary realms to allow her to meditate on issues of personal fate and destiny.

Despite the literary titling, Three Notable American Novellas is dealing with images, albeit through both photographs and objects. Undisclosed within the exhibition, the accompanying catalogue, American Letter, identifies three short American fictions: William Faulkner’s ‘As I Lay Dying’, Herman Melville’s ‘Bartleby the Scrivener and Truman Capote’s ‘Music for Chameleons’. What links these three for Beasley are a series of potentially wild, literary objects or figures that bear heavily and intensely on space, both architecturally and mentally.

Recently described by Alessio Ascari as ‘mental objects’, the conceptual blueprints for Beasley’s recent sculptures, her ‘woodworks’, stem from a combination of literary references (fictions) and existing domestic or bodily dimensions. An odd kind of carpentry ensues.

A number of the works incorporate as a dimension the US Letter paper size (8 ½ x 11 inches). Since the 1970’s, this format has not been used outside of America and is currently being devalued within certain institutions in the US in preference for the International A-series. Beasley’s US Letter sized works perhaps anticipate the future obsolescence of this format.

The primary reference for the woodworks in the exhibition comes from Faulkner’s novella ‘As I Lay Dying’, in which a dying woman lies in a bed by a window in order to oversee that her sons are building her a good coffin. The Sleep, Night works are scaled-up from the symbol of a coffin that appears as a symbol within the text of Faulkner’s ‘As I Lay Dying’.

Night Music, a highly reflective black object based on the exact, if abstracted, dimensions of an upright piano (Professional 125A) that has been turned on its side, appears as if it has fallen from space. The piano structure has been hollowed out, its imaginary internal spaces becoming empty panelled interiors reminiscent of a series of telephone booths or confessionals. The title refers to a short story by Truman Capote called ‘Music for Chameleons’ in which features both a piano and a black mirror.

Beasley’s largest photographic work to date, Malcontenta, is a seamed photograph made from one half of a single negative. The object within the image reaches from the floor to the ceiling of the space, as does the photographic object within the gallery itself. The work proposes itself as a potential screen or screening object. The screen-like object was produced from a reading of the ‘high, green, folding screen’ that features in Bartleby the Scrivener. However, it bears no clear illustrative resemblance. What the high green folding screen within the novella offered Beasley was not an obvious object, but a series of implications for practice and the workings of the studio. The black on black design produces, intermittently, an illusory ‘deep space’, which the reflective gloss both confirms and undoes. It is both flat and deep, object and image.

In his late essay on Herman Melville’s Bartleby, Gilles Deleuze mysteriously describes the screen as ‘prairie green’ and currently the artist is unable to find a source for this specification of the colour. Beasley asked four American residents to purchase and ship a ream of copy paper to her. The instructions regarding the colour were that it be ‘prairie green’. The resulting works, Green Ream, are each made from a ream of green US Letter sized paper, tightly packed into in a handmade American walnut veneer case. Deleuze’s mysterious specification has been usefully implicated as it foregrounds the question of nature which is an ongoing motif in the novella. The Ream Green works are understood as being miniature landscapes. The green paper also produces the only colour in the exhibition, apart from that offered by the use of wood.



________________________________________________________________ An artist’s publication, American Letter, published by Laura Bartlett Gallery, with text by John Slyce and Becky Beasley has been produced in an edition of 500 copies to coincide with the exhibition. A limited edition version is also available in an edition of 35 signed and numbered copies (£150 each + VAT). The limited edition version includes a seamed variation of the photograph Malcontenta that has been hand-printed by the artist and produced especially for the limited edition publication.


________________________________________________________________ Becky Beasley (b.1975, UK) graduated from Goldsmiths College, London in 1999 and from The Royal College of Art in 2002. Selected solo exhibitions include Eleven Years Later, Office Baroque Gallery, Antwerp, Decors du Silence!, UBU Gallery, Glasgow, Six Stories, Millefiori Art Space, Athens and Thru Darkly Night, Whitechapel Project Space, London. Beasley has exhibited recently in the following group exhibitions, Ost Property, Danielle Arnaud, London, Black & White, IBID Projects, London, Encosta Galleria, Lisbon and Bloomberg New Contemporaries, Liverpool and London. This year Becky Beasley was selected for the Artists Pension Trust. (www.aptglobal.org).

Laura Bartlett Gallery is designed by architect Tom Bartlett.

For more information please contact Zayne Armstrong mail@laurabartlettgallery.com/07771 803 606