• Becky Beasley

Fall

September marks the beginning of Autumn, or Fall, as it is more commonly known in the united States. Following her recent explorations of Spring, Beasley turns here to our ‘second spring’, to explore the Autumnal moment as a sculptural proposition. Here, however, the physical and temporal fall is a suspended moment, photographic in its interruption of time in space.

Fall (i, ii, iii) – oversized photographic enlargements of a single Tuscan walnut from three profiles- are installed upside down, the nuts hanging like droplets or, for Beasley, pregnant, saturnine planets. Bearings (i, ii, iii) – three brass cast works made from twigs collected by the artist’s father from wind-fall after the St. Jude storm in England. The purposely-tapering, mismatched fragments screw together like a snooker cue and rotate at 1.5 revolutions per minute (rpm). In homage to Bas Jan Ader’s fall works, here both Fall and Bearings speak of the potential of a body suspended precariously in space.

Fall, Stand is made from cast brass and black American walnut. A fragile, hanging cast twig acts as an impossible single leg to a small walnut floating shelf. Beasley has worked with brass and american walnut for a number of years. Originally choosing the wood not only for its physical qualities, but also conceptually as a way of speaking about the darker side of American culture, for Beasley these are saturnine things. Slightly out of view, in the office, and mirroring Fall, Stand, albeit darkly, Floating Shelf Instructions (from behind) – a highly detailed 200% enlargement of what was a cheap A5 instructions leaflet- has been printed in reverse. Positioning the viewer inside the wall, so to speak, the reversal alludes to the darker interiors of sealed nuts and other rooms.

Camera (i, ii, iii, iv, v) are a series of triangular black American walnut sculptures whose exterior dimensions are based on a 1977 Penguin paperback edition of Saul Bellow’s existential novel, Dangling Man (1944). They are exhibited on a circular 1950’s Italian table. Each of the sculptures has a single hole the size of a small bird or walnut on one face. Neither a bird-box nor a pinhole camera, each sculpture also has one black lacquered face and a different interior angle, all five of which total 360º. Beasley’s interest in the ambiguities inherent in spiritual and esoteric codes reveals itself in her overt use of the triangle, which has a special place within mystical traditions. If the exhibition is in some ways a personal exploration of American and European exitentialism, at its centre, perhaps, is the understanding that faith in something always requires a suspension of disbelief.