Becky Beasley, Sleep is When You Grow, 31st Biennial of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana, 2015, installation view of the accompanying exhibition at Škuc Gallery.
Photo: Jaka Babnik. MGLC Archive.
The Becky Beasley exhibition included a series of printed posters that the artist used to declare her love story, interweaving it with images of a sculpture inspired by the work of Carlo Mollino. Curator Vladimir Vidmar invited visitors to view the exhibition with the following words: “It is the unheimlich sensation that engulfs the viewer on first entering the show, as if what is the most intimate in us emanated a disquieting kind of unfamiliarity, an unsettling opacity. Sleep is when you grow is a show based, like much of Beasley’s work, on the tensions between the image, object and language. Two photographic images. Abstract, shelf like structures. A pair of huge revolving sculptures. Images that change into objects and objects that perform as images. On the one hand, there are only two photographs in this solo exhibition; the first a large, life-size close-up of the foliage of a fig tree, the second a small, life-size image of a man’s hand holding a pair of walnuts. On the other, there are hundreds of photographs, those comprising the work Flora, A Life (2013). Like leaves – both those in a book and a tree – the works in this exhibition all consider abstracted nature as a way of thinking about time and space; as cyclical, seasonal, sexual, familial. But what is it that makes these works so familiar, captivating, and simultaneously ominous? It is the fact that they are not to be taken as mere elements of a natural language with its expressive allegorical ranges, but that they articulate a distrust of language. They are condensed into mathemes, formulas that reveal the limits of the utterable and representable, opening up an ambivalent zone where the Real protrudes through the cracks in the Symbolic.”
Curator: Vladimir Vidmar.
Coproducers: International Centre for Graphic Arts and Škuc Gallery.