Critical Distance Centre for Curators and Knot Project Space, in partnership with Equitable Bank and Pleasure Dome, presented this artist talk and screening with LA-based artist, writer, and Dean of Critical Studies at CalArts, Amanda Beech. The presentation was one of several programming engagements with Beech in spring 2019 coordinated by Knot Project Space, which involved an exhibition in Ottawa, artistic research at the Diefenbunker Cold War Bunker, a workshop and two sister-talks in Ottawa and Toronto.
Constructing Time
For this talk, Beech spoke on the main themes that have mobilized her practice, focusing on how the relation between art and power is constructed in the choreographing of time. The machinations of time-based art have often led it to privilege ‘the open’ and to identify art with the future as an indeterminate potentiality. This means that it has often rejected any regulative principles that would provide a sense of determination for a future. But this rejection still formats a future that is present to us, and often this has proved unsatisfactory in meeting our political aspirations. Beech delved into how the ordering of time in sequence, assemblage, montage and abstraction can offer the construction of another sense-experience of time as well as craft the possibility for another, future, time and space.
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.
Exhibition: Public Syntax. Feb. 7 – March 31, 2019. Critical Distance, Toronto.
Talk: Art’s Possible Worlds, Amanda Beech. March 27, 2019. Knot Project Space.
Workshop: Art and the Conception of Reality, Amanda Beech. March 30, 2019. SAW Video.