Walead Beshty
Equivalents
March 2 – April 7, 2018
Press preview with the artist: Friday, March 2, 11:00 am
Opening reception: Friday, March 2, 6:00 – 8:00 pm
Gallery hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
Regen Projects is pleased to present Equivalents, an exhibition by LA-based artist Walead Beshty. The show brings together a selection of photographs, sculptures, and collages that incorporate the traces of bodies, circulation, and labor within the surface of the artwork. This marks the artist’s fourth solo presentation at the gallery.
The installation of the works in Equivalents is premised on the relationships between the artist’s seemingly disparate bodies of work on view. The RA4 Contact Prints are examples of Beshty’s use of a fixed set of predetermined constraints. These works represent a recent shift of this practice, whereby two lengths of the photographic paper are simultaneously exposed and then sent through the processor face-to-face to create a diptych. The lengths are measured against the scale of the human body in complete darkness, resulting in two slightly unequal sizes whose colors and physical markings index the work’s production.
Dangling from the ceiling of the gallery or skewered on steel poles, the Office Work sculptures are comprised of deconstructed office equipment. Powered on, these reconfigured computers, printers, and scanners tirelessly attempt to function despite the constraints imposed upon them. Similarly, LED televisions punctured with a standard 12-inch diameter cement drill bit or sliced evenly in half expose their inner machinations. The resulting impact to the screen creates colorful, aleatory abstractions trickling across its surface.
Also on view is a selection of machine polished copper sculptures. Referred to as “surrogates,” the works are installed and de-installed without the use of protective gloves. This process accrues the indelible imprint of their handling onto the surface of the material, making the index of the labor involved in their display central to the work. Elsewhere, polished copper plates are etched with images of medical scans of the artist’s body and reproductions of his prescriptions.
A side gallery features a row of blue, black, and purple hued square prints from his ongoing travel Transparencies series. These images are created by exposing positive and negative 4 x 5 transparency film to the X-rays emitted from airport security screening equipment. Once developed, the film reveals unforeseen phantom abstractions. Nearby, a suite of newspaper collages feature delicately sliced concentric circles incised into the surface of the newsprint. Each cut out section is rotated to create new patterns and combinations of image, color, and text. The misregistration that occurs between the separated forms is further bonded with gold leaf. During the installation of this show a series of new newspaper collages featuring the front pages of the Los Angeles Times will be created on site. The headlines and contents of each paper situate the exhibition in a particular time and place, and represent the current affairs that transpire outside the gallery walls.
– Ben Thornborough, Los Angeles
Walead Beshty (b. 1976, London, UK) is an artist and writer working in Los Angeles.
Selected solo exhibitions include A Partial Disassembling of an Invention without a Future: Helter-Skelter and Random Notes in which the Pulleys and Cogwheels are Lying around at Random All over the Workbench, Curve Gallery at the Barbican Centre, London, England (2014); Securities and Exchanges, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China (2011); A Diagram of Forces, Malmö Konsthall, Sweden / Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid, Spain (2011); and Legibility on Color Backgrounds, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (2009). His work was included in the 56th Biennale di Venezia (2015); the Tate Triennial (2009); and Whitney Biennial (2008). Beshty has organized exhibitions including, Picture Industry, Hessel Museum, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY (2017); Picture Industry, LUMA Arles, Arles, France (2016); On the Matter of Abstraction (figs. A & B): Parallel Exhibitions of Post-War Non-Figurative Art from the Collection, with Christopher Bedford, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA (2013); and The Gold Standard, with Bob Nickas, at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NY (2006). This fall an expanded version of the exhibition Picture Industry travels back to LUMA Arles, France.
Work by the artist is featured in numerous permanent museum collections worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Tate, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; among others.
Recent and forthcoming publications include 33 Texts: 93,614 Words: 581,035 Characters, Selected Writings (2003–2015) (JRP|Ringier, 2016); Industrial Portraits: Volume One, 2008–2012 (JRP|Ringier, 2017); Industrial Portraits: Volume Two, 2012–2017 (JRP|Ringier, 2018); and Picture Industry: A Provisional History of the Technical Image (1844–2017) (JRP|Ringier, 2018).
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An opening reception will be held on Friday, March 2, from 6:00 – 8:00 pm.
For all press inquiries, please contact Ben Thornborough at +1 310 276 5424 or benthornborough@regenprojects.com.
For all other inquiries, please contact Jennifer Loh, Lindsay Charlwood, or Isha Welsh at Regen Projects.