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Robert Beck
Misappropriating material excised from both popular and sub-cultural sources, Robert Beck’s art ramifies in an array of mediums, including drawing, photography, sculpture, installation, and video. In concisely “off-register” works that often conflate personal and cultural confabulations, phenomenology insinuates as psychology. Abiding themes, such as masculinity, forensics, language, epistemology, and sexuality, yield ultimately to art making itself, a consummate “how to.”
Robert Beck was born in 1959 in Baltimore, Maryland. He now lives and works in New York City. |
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Horizon
In the series titled Horizon Zhang has traveled to a remote village in central China to make photographic portraits of the young girls in the village. The resulting images, printed larger than life size, were combined to make a large installation of three rows; in the top row the girls squat on the hill looking down to the viewers; in the middle row the girls’ eyes are at your eye level; in the bottom row the girls are placed in a field of grass and look up to the viewers. In the remote countryside the innocent female child is in a position of powerlessness, though here they are formed into a collective body and from it their collective naïve gaze questions the outside world with a clear magnitude and power of its own.
My inspiration is from the concept of "Rebellion is the rule", the slogan from Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966 -1976). I try to produce a series of images that question current assumptions about the primacy of western power in my own understanding. - O Zhang |