Presented as part of Knot Project Space’s Video in the Public Sphere Speaker Series – a program of lectures that ran from October 2018 – April 2019. The series ran concurrently with a year-long public art commissioning program which culminated in the exhibition Knot Projections 2019: Imagining Publics featuring five large-scale outdoor video projections installed at four sites/surfaces throughout the city. The speaker series stimulated critical thinking during these commissions by bringing to Ottawa five national and international artists, curators and critics who were thinking through questions of publicness, site-specificity and civic engagement in their respective practices. Each delivered a talk in the project space and at times conducted follow-up seminars or workshops with the group of commissioned artists and other artists in the community. Each speaker also offered a reading list of texts related to their ongoing research. This presentation was one of several programming engagements with Amanda Beech in spring 2019 coordinated by Knot Project Space, which involved an exhibition in Ottawa, artistic research at the Diefenbunker Military Facility, a workshop and two sister-talks in Ottawa and Toronto.
Art’s Possible Worlds
In the talk, Beech discussed the overarching themes of her work, concentrating on the possibilities for a realist art, what this would mean, and how it ought to function. To address this theme, she concentrated on and screened specific video works that have explored the relation between image, site and location, as well as the philosophical questions regarding the nature of our reality that produce these relations. In other words, Beech’s lecture asked: what role does our conception of the world play in our notions of place? How might the construction of an artwork that takes this into account behave as a location in itself? This presentation was one of several programming engagements with Beech in spring 2019, which involved an exhibition at Knot Project Space, artistic research, a workshop and two sister-talks in Ottawa and Toronto.
Amanda Beech
Amanda Beech is an artist and writer living in Los Angeles. Using a range of compelling rhetorical and often dogmatic narratives and texts, Beech’s work poses questions and propositions for what a realist art can be in today’s culture; that is, a work that can articulate a comprehension of reality without the terminal mirror of a human identity that is used to picture it.
Related Programming
Exhibition: Covenant Transport, Move or Die, Amanda Beech. March 9 – April 6, 2019.
Talk: Constructing Time, Amanda Beech. April 1, 2019. Critical Distance, Toronto.
Workshop: Art and the Conception of Reality, Amanda Beech. March 30, 2019. SAW Video.