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23/5/2014

Rollin Beamish

Greusslich Contemporary, Berlin

Can socially critical art change something or does it only serve as relief from a sense of unease about our environment? The art of Rollin Beamish is in a difficult position because it is a reflection of cultural discourse. The problem, however, is that the art is both a critique of cultural discourse and a product of this discourse. How can we break this circle? Can this art change from a palliative measure to an actual agent of change and can art uphold this assertion?

Rollin Beamish‘s 3rd solo exhibition at Greusslich Contemporary is called "Palliative Measures" and includes drawings and small installations. The exhibition focuses on freehand drawn portraits. The sources for these images were found by Beamish on the Internet, which he himself refers to as the „Immanent Archive“. He resurrects these images from the abstract, lifeless web space and brings that which exists only as data or media, to life. The translation of bad jpgs into drawing gives the images a new physicality. Thus, there is a high degree of tension between the abstract, hyper-real sources, taken from the Internet‘s graveyard, their new incarnations in Beamish's drawings and their real subjects.

Looking at the portraits, one wonders who are these found subjects? Are they just an artificial construct? Do they have a real existence or have they been hyper-realistically constructed independently from any existence? How evolved, or developed is their identity? What role have they portrayed in social and cultural processes? What discourse of Western and global culture can we identify? Do we command the discourse or does it have a life of its own? Is the discourse just an attempt to alleviate our collective suffering? Beamish’s exhibition title, "Palliative Measures" also reinforces these questions.

Beamish's concept poses questions about today's cultural and media processes, which he emphasizes through the medium of drawing. His drawings are just as hyper realistic and surreally detailed as the media space itself and create the impression of something at once foreign and familiar. The portraits are set on sharply defined, unworked backgrounds and float in empty space. Just like the space of media, they are difficult to define. Do these subjects have a background and a source/foundation or did they simply come out of nowhere?

The contrast between perfectly detailed, hyper-realistic drawings and raw, undefined surrounding space creates an exciting dynamic. The portraits act mostly as fragments, with only the heads represented in their entirety. The chest area breaks at illogical points in the drawing's form and suddenly gives the feeling that something is missing, unfinished or perhaps not even started.

For Beamish, content plays an even more important role than the form. In the series of images relating to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we find a portrait drawing of Islam Greagea, a five year old boy who was killed in 2011 during an Israeli air strike in Gaza. Over this portrait hangs an installation, which creates a mirror reflection and a shadow of the name of the boy at the wall in Latin and Arabic letters. This is a subtle way to give the boy's death a certain conciseness, as Beamish doesn't shy away from scrutinizing society, even through the depiction of shocking moments.

In another picture from this series we see a stone dripping with blood and covered with traces of hair, inscribed with the words: "Wait for it". What should one wait for? What can you expect? The same fate as Islam Greagea? It sounds like a note or a warning that gives rise to an atmosphere of fear; a fear that can be perceived as a refined instrument of political power.

Text plays a very special role for Beamish. This is evident in the next series of pictures which show three portraits of the actor Chiwetel Ejiofor in three different roles. In the center of the paper drawings we find a longer text installed as a wall drawing, which is entitled with the words, "Where is she?"[2]. The connection between word and image opens a new level of interpretation of the artwork and develops a hermeneutical conversation, whereupon the understanding of the work scales to new horizons. The text deals with something existential, something that is present in all of our internal processes. The integration of words with pictures reminds us of the intimate statements of Tracy Emin. Nonetheless, I think that the art of Rollin Beamish exceeds this intimacy of the word and leads to something universal and collective. In Beamish, a subjective statement can represent a collective one and vice versa.

In the films to which the portraits of Chiwetel Ejiofor refer, the figures are more or less in desperate situations. One finds oneself in the center of conflicts between different political systems, their violence and their power games. Does the text embody an idea of the old and lost world order or a lost home? Is the text the confession of an artist who seeks in the middle of the sea the course to a lost land and is influenced by instructions that are forced upon him by the "Big Other"?

„...suddenly the intensity of her desire which destroys her, terrifies me…”

Is “she” an object of our never-ending desire; the representation of longing for the lost land, for liberation, for a union with “her”​​, for wholeness, for craving something unattainable? Or should the text be interpreted as a reference to something that we can touch, but which is denied to us?

„She is no longer the one who prepared meals, washed herself, or bought small articles.”

In Beamish's work, an idiosyncratic net of meaning is formed, which is full of symbols and intertextual references. In his other images and installations at Greusslich Contemporary we see how he sets his typical symbols in new contexts. Thus we find again a symbol of the "Gorgon Medusa" or a drawing of the "Digesting Duck" (1738) by the French inventor Jacques de Vaucanson. Every detail in Beamish’s work has meaning and is a fragment of a complex mythology in which the heroes are either carriers or victims of social discourse; a mythology which is a great mirror of today's cultural processes, which awakens a concern about the development of Western society; a mythology that shows us quite strangely, how the famous exclamation of Rimbaud, “I is another” is today reversed with the exclamation "WE is another!"

Text by Filip Machac

[1] Titel von Rollin Beamish. Text: Georges Bataille "La Part Maudite, Band 2: Teil 2: Kapitel 4, The Object of Desire and the Totality of the Real.

[2] Title by Rollin Beamish. Text: Quote of Georges Bataille, "La Part Maudite", Issue 2 Part 2 Chapter 4, The Object of Desire and the Totality of the Real.

Vernissage: 24.05.2014, 6-9 pm
Finissage: 28.06.2014, 6-9 pm

Greusslich Contemporary
Buchholzer Str. 11 - 10437 Berlin
Open: Wed+Thu 4-9 pm, Sat + Sun 1-6 pm

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