Have you met…Rachel Beach?

Rachel Beach, Studio

An introduction can be a wonderful thing. You can meet interesting people, and make new friends. You can be introduced to your new favorite foods, books, music, or artist.

I’d like to introduce you to some of my favorite artists. Some of whom I’ve been familiar with for years, and others I’ve only recently been introduced to.

The person I’d like to introduce is the artist Rachel Beach.

Rachel Beach, Figure 8, 2011

Rachel Beach (b. Canada, 1975) is an artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Her works have been exhibited in New York at Blackston, Lennon Weinberg, Mixed Greens and Samck Mellon, throughout Canada at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, PlugIn Institute of Contemporary Art and Eyelevel Gallery and internationally in Germany and England. Beach studied at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and received an MFA from Yale University. She has received numerous awards including fellowships from Yaddo, Socrates Sculpture Park, the Lower East Side Printshop and Vermont Studio Center, and grants from The Canada Council for the Arts and The Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, Interview, C Magazine, among others.

“Distance Trance” solo exhibition By Rachel Beach at Smack Mellon NY, 2011

Artist Statement

“My works merge archeological and architectural influences with spatial and formal investigations. They begin with something elemental, a basic geometry or construction: a stack, an edge, a mark, the seam where two things meet. These beginnings set up a logic; a link to something primal or factual that can then be prodded to suggest a mystery; something specific yet unknowable, a wrinkle, an itch.

Each piece employs real and implied structure — form and surface, object and image — to create a shifting visual experience: to flatten or open up space, to knock perception off-balance and to present a contingency of meaning. Built around concepts of solid and void, construct and language, progress and extinction, they present a back and forth between what is and isn’t there and ask us to consider how we see and what we believe.” RB

Rachel Beach Trace 2012

Other material relating to Rachel Beach.

Artist website: www.rachelbeach.com

Vimeo: Rachel Beach.

ArtSlant: Rachel Beach.

Progress Repost: Rachel Beach.

Hyperallergic: A Discussion With Joy Curtis and Rachel Beach.

Brooklyn Rail: Rachel Beach and Nora Herting.

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