AMANDA BEECH

Cause and Effect

Amanda Beech, Cause and Effect Series 1 – Paitings, 2019

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OPENING:  Saturday, 29 June 2019 – H 6.00 pm

01 July 2019 – 30 September 2019

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Artericambi Gallery is proud to present, for the first time in Italy, the solo exhibition of the British artist Amanda Beech. Her work traverses the aesthetic and philosophical paradigms of institutional, individualistic, metaphysical, rational and mythological authorities to propose a new realist politics of the artwork itself that can surpass the tragic consciousness and the ideal skepticism that has mutually championed and debilitated the value of art in Modern and contemporary culture. The multichannel video installation Covenant Transport, Move or Die (2015) mixes the languages of social-scientific inquiry with pop and game show aesthetics to conjure a vertiginous landscape that is at once mobile and heavy, quick and brutal. Five characters  form a workerist crew comprising manager, worker, programmer, consumer, and dealer who program and mobilize the unrelenting movements of economies, states, culture and people. The viewer is forced to face the speed of the of the process of production and its paradoxical purposelessness beyond its own reproduction and overwhelming diffraction.

Alongside this Beech will exhibit a series of two-dimensional works featuring paintings, stencils and “holes” entitled Cause and Effect (2017). These worksfocus on maxims and mantras that have been associated with the correlation between thinking, acting and its social consequences. The belief systems shown in the work remain central in defining the value of art and politics today. By negating the equality of the correlate terms, the works question the validity of these beliefs but also explore how we rely upon such correlations to make meaning in the world. The works play this out in a game-like aesthetic, literally and formally by proposing that each work in a series is a correlate to another; each causing the other in a sort mechanical chain of events. Here the works recall the deeoer myths of art; that of the autonomous self-causation of modern art, the tautology of ideology and the tautology of artistic self-expression. The simultaneous constructing and dismantling of these systems demonstrates the problems of the reproductive imperatives in art, that have actually prevented action and thought to be oriented toward a truly transformative end.

BothCause and Effectand Covenant Transport, Move or Dieaddress the urgent need to think beyond these manifest mechanisms, towards the production of meaning that take place in the world without cause.

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Amanda Beech, Installation view “Cause and Effect”, 2019

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BIO

Amanda Beech is an artist and writer. Her work entangles narratives of power, cause and functionalism from philosophical theory, literature and real political events, exploring how the myths that seem necessary for an account of human agency are lived with, but can also be supplanted by a realist politics. Through entangling narratives of power and agency from philosophical theory, noir-ish narratives of TV shows like 24, CSI, the hard-boiled writing of James Ellroy and real political events, her artwork, in video, print and sculpture manifest an argument for a propositional art that executes another form of force to surpass the notion that art simply reflects and reproduces the status quo. The work traverses the aesthetic and philosophical paradigms of institutional, individualistic, metaphysical, rational and mythological authorities to propose a new realist politics of the artwork itself that can surpass the tragic consciousness and the ideal skepticism that has mutually championed and debilitated the value of art in Modern and contemporary culture. In this hard critique of liberal and neo-liberal cultural politics her work examines and produces the condition of language as force and the force of language with the weight of a commitment to a future.

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(LEFT) Amanda Beech, Cause and Effect Series 1 Paitings: No Horizon does not equal Progressive Future , 2019 – Print, paint, craft paper, wood, and spray paint on paper with cut outs, 61 x 38 x 0,7 inch / (RIGHT) Amanda Beech, Cause and Effect Series 1 Paitings: Self Conception does not equal Self Transformation, 2019 – Print, paint, craft paper, wood, and spray paint on paper with cut outs, 61 x 38 x 0,7 inch 

(LEFT) Amanda Beech, Cause and Effect Series 2 Stencils: Self Abnegation does not equal Revolution, 2019 – Spray paint on paper with cut outs, wood, 59 x 41 x 0,7 inch & Amanda Beech, Cause and Effect Series 2 Stencils: Self Conception does not equal Self Transformation, 2019 – Spray paint on paper with cut outs, wood, 59 x 41 x 0,7 inch / (RIGHT) Amanda Beech, Cause and Effect Series 2 Stencils: No Horizon does not equal progressive future – Spray paint on paper with cut outs, wood, 59 x 41 x 0,7 inch

(LEFT) Amanda Beech, Cause and Effect Series 3 Holes: Self Conception does not equal Self Transformation, 2019 – Paper, spray paint, craft paper, wood, 43 x 30 x 0,7 inch / (RIGHT) Amanda Beech, Cause and Effect Series 3 Holes: No Horizon does not equal Progressive Future, 2019 – Paper, spray paint, craft paper, wood, 43 x 30 x 0,7 inch

Amanda Beech, Covenant Transport, Move or Die, 2019 – Installation view, 22.47 Minutes