As we speak, artist Justin Colt Beckman is making the trip from Seattle to Brooklyn, bringing with him the works that won him the title of Solo Show Legend in our Winter 2010 3rd Ward Open Call. Next Friday, October 8th, we will be celebrating his win and the remarkable multi-media artwork in his show, RURAL FAMOUS. Join us at 195 Morgan for a down-South gallery opening featuring installations, sculpture, new-media, live bluegrass, and FREE Busch Light (at the request of the artist).
Learn more about the pieces in RURAL FAMOUS, as well as Beckman's fascinating exploration of country/city life and 21st-century masculinity in Beckman's Artist Statement:
The works in Rural Famous have given me the opportunity to not only explore issues surrounding the urban/rural dichotomy, but also have allowed me to fully engage with and explore rural activities vicariously through my art-making. As someone who is essentially a city boy with country boy tendencies, the creation of “hillbilly” tableaus has provided a shortcut around the exclusionary, generational requirements typically associated with rural activities. Instead of learning the skill of hunting through a generational hand-me-down of tradition, I am able to acquire my skills through hours of game play on my Play Station, and I am able to claim my trophy buck with a few simple mouse clicks on Ebay, followed by a quick and painless PayPal transaction. As a whole, the exhibition becomes somewhat of a mystical “countrypolitan” environment, a town of my own creation that rises happily and peacefully above the center of a long feud between urban and rural cultures. “The rural is thus shifted from the material sphere of the locality to the more dematerialized realm of mental space; it becomes a virtual structure.”
Among the works in Rural Famous, the two installations function very much as small theatre sets. Honky Tonk, inspired by music variety shows, karaoke, and childhood lip-sync concerts, transforms part of 3rd Ward into a full-scale country bar for the month of October. Combining video projection and sound, with found materials dragged over from rural Washington, Honky Tonk provides me the opportunity to explore the act of country music stardom while visitors drink some cold beer, throw their peanut shells on the floor, and watch me sing a few of my favorite country tunes.
For Homestead I removed a small abandoned building from the central Washington landscape, and gave the building a new sense of place amidst the hustle and bustle of New York City. On its most basic level, the installation functions as a self portrait and incorporates life-size video projections of my dog and myself engaging in the uninspired yet necessary trivia of daily living. The main characters in the installation become digital, ghost-like references to the deterioration of both real time and the tangible qualities of our daily lives and interactions. Existing somewhere between a stage set and the digital realm of ones and zeros, viewers are given the freedom to gaze upon the private activities of the subjects without the hang-ups of real-life interaction. As viewers watch the video representation of me endlessly eating pieces of Kentucky Fried Chicken, belch, or my interruptive text-messaging quickly give me away as something other than a “hillbilly redneck.”
This awkwardness and sense of something-not-quite-right is also apparent in the digital images titled Self-Portraits (from the Sportsman series). Here I portray myself as a great hunter, as a true mountain-man who is not only self-sufficient, but who is also a symbol for the great frontiersman and American individualism, a man’s man. Since hunting is not part of my genealogical heritage, a simple cut-and-paste is an easy alternative to years of trial and error in the field. Since images of the stereotype began surfacing around the late 1700s, “hillbillies” have mostly been portrayed as “backwoods ectomorphs with overlong beards, barefeet, slouch hats, rifles, and whiskey jugs.” My approach, however, is one more of admiration. Any humor resulting from the images is more the result of my face not being an authentic fit to the proud demeanor of this “noble savage.”
The piece titled, Black Bear is another example of my attempt to bag a trophy animal. If I were to wander into the woods, rifle in tow, to track down the majestic North American Black Bear, I wouldn’t have the slightest idea where to start. Ordering up the necessary materials to construct my own representation of the resulting trophy, now that I can do. Inspired by Damian Hirst’s diamond encrusted skull, titled For The Love of God, as well as Hollywood’s idea of the “Rhinestone Cowboy,” Black Bear is the bright lights, big city
version of “a land populated by hard-drinking and lazy backwoodsmen, who were prone to violence and thrilled by the rugged sport of bear hunting.” I think of Black Bear as a mystical creature, whom if you should happen upon in the middle of the woods he would grant you three wishes. My first wish would be, “to know how to get out of the woods.”
Lastly, video and new media play a significant role in the presentation of Rural Famous, not only in the Honky Tonk and Homestead installations, but also in the two works, Take One Down and Automatic. Because rural stereotypes have traditionally been the antithesis of “modernity” and “progress,” video and new media are an appropriate means of bridging the gap in the urban/rural dichotomy. Both of these works, on their most basic levels are self-portraits, but beyond that, they afford me the opportunity to continue my vicarious engagement in rural activities through my art-making, while simultaneously creating dialog about the way we view and interpret open spaces, as well as 2-dimensional vs. 3-dimensional space. Take One Down, a video in which I shoot towards the camera at a neatly stacked 30-pack of Busch beer, was in fact the first piece that set the course for my investigation into rural life and its associated stereotypes. Had my regular hikes into the central Washington hills not been spotted with others’ remnants of backhills partying, then my own acceptance and appreciation of my inner country-boy may never have surfaced.
Oct 8, 2010
