Arts+Leisure is pleased to announce Severed Mends, an exhibition of recent mixed-media works and paintings by Paige Beeber. Reflecting her background in sculpture, Beeber’s work bears a pointed physicality, with traces of the artist’s hand and material detritus serving, in her own words, “to diminish borders between where, when, how and what into a singular moment of creation”. Overlaying her inner emotions and evolution upon her dynamic and spontaneous studio practice, Beeber’s abstract paintings evoke the explosive inspiration of creation while simultaneously preserving the atmospheric presence of specific emotional states and moods.
Characterized by an interplay of fluid forms with hard-edged collage and mixed-media elements, her abstractions are richly layered, with contrasting patterns and abstracted, painterly passages. In “Rosebuds” and “Untitled”, she pairs a checkerboard pattern with scrawled, curling lines and impasto strokes, a multiplicity of stylistic variations that calls attention to the negative space around her cut and shaped supports. Beeber constructs a similar structure of parallel visual idioms in “Unsolved Patterns”; transposing vertical washes of viscous cerulean and indigo over a net-like support of cut paper, she creates a paradoxical duality of vigorous motion and rigid corporeality.
Exposing the procedural framework of her mixed-media pieces, she invites the viewer into her practice, fostering a reciprocal relationship between the work, its viewers, and Beeber herself. Welcoming “the painter’s object to be seen as art itself”, she accents this reciprocal interplay of voyeurism and exhibitionism, disrupting the conventional hierarchy of the viewer’s gaze through pieces that “desire” to be seen. Capturing the vulnerability as well as the dynamism of the creative moment, the works in Severed Mends are indelibly marked with the energy of inspiration and intuition.
Beeber’s work is also attuned to emotional resonances, echoing her self-described “fascination with creating specificity in situations, moods, and emotional languages”, which are often intimately linked to the creative timeline of their respective pieces. Her synthesis of abstraction and psychological projection is particularly visible in “Where Did the Flowers Go?”, wherein a mottled backdrop of dark gold and umber tones is blotted out with patches of black paint, evoking turbulent emotional tenebrism.
Based in Brooklyn, NY, Paige Beeber received her BFA from Alfred University. Working from intuition, her abstract paintings and mixed-media works reflect a deep sensitivity to spontaneity of artistic creation as well as her background in sculpture. Her work has been exhibited in group and solo exhibitions nationally and abroad, including Spaceworks (NY), Sweet Lorraine Gallery (NY), and Soulland (Copenhagen, DK), among others. She recently completed a residency at the DNA Artist Residency Program in Provincetown, MA.