Art and the Conception of Reality, Amanda Beech



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. 

About Art and the Conception of Reality

This seminar led by Amanda Beech investigated a range of questions that dug into what artistic practice has got to do with reason. By working through required readings and group discussion, Beech led a conversation that contemplates this relationship as a tool for navigating and mapping possible worlds. Core questions were: Is it possible for art to produce a picture of the real world? How might art do this within the conditions of a world that it takes to be unsatisfactory at the level of political power? How could the world be imaged when our imagining of it is incomplete?

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: Art’s Possible Worlds, Amanda Beech. March 27, 2019. Knot Project Space.


Talk: Constructing Time, Amanda Beech. April 1, 2019. Critical Distance, Toronto.