Ericka Beckman
08 Feb - 04 May 2014
ERICKA BECKMAN
Works 1978 - 2013
8 February - 4 May 2014
Curator: Yves Aupetitallot
American artist Ericka Beckman was trained at CalArts in the mid-1970s. There she met a number of artists, friends and later collaborators, Matt Mullican, James Casebere and Mike Kelley.
Beckman finds inspiration from a number of sources, including the developmental psychology of Jean Piaget, as well as American sport culture, Hollywood films, and 1960’s cartoons. Integrating these sources to her own vivid imagination, Beckman’s films bring to life what she calls “the performance of the image.”
Taking especially from Piaget’s thesis that physical action is the basis of all language, Beckman creates animated games, incorporating their structural elements of rhythm, repetition, verbal chants, and colorful symbolic imagery. In her Super-8 Trilogy, Beckman explores the child’s acquisition of symbolic thought. When the child sets an object in motion, the action becomes a mental image, and once this image is acquired and stable, it establishes a schema of further action.
The sets and props of Beckman’s films are hand-made, and then animated by the use of a stop-motion technique. Ericka Beckman uses a technique called in camera superimposition, where she rewinds the film in the camera and shoots several images on top of each other for each scene.
Using this craft-based process of creating objects, instead of employing newer technologies, gives Beckman the concentration she needs. Without an exact pre-knowledge of how each image will materialize, the possibility of “mistakes” is introduced, and then incorporated into the creative process. This keeps her film making active, performative, and filled with surprise.
“ Film is creating a reality through the makeshift. My films move backwards, using narrative structures, as does the mind of anyone trying to grasp the meaning of images in his memory.
I juxtapose a model of the past, those ‘should have been’ meanings, with the past as remembered, as known to be riddled with mistakes and breeches of meaning. I reconstruct events and places as models to identify the details of a ‘choice’ or to locate the moment a ‘choice’ was available but went by unseized. By recalling the fear evoked by choice, film can fictionalize that fear and provide new consequences." Ericka Beckman, published in the catalogue for Horror Pleni, 1980.
MAGASIN will host Ericka Beckman’s solo exhibition after it has been shown at the Kunsthalle in Berne. She will present a selection of her video works, her photographs and her drawings in MAGASIN’s galleries.
Born in Hampstead, NY in 1951, Ericka Beckman is an artist and filmmaker, living and working in New York.
Graduating from CalArts in 1976, she started to exhibit in the mid-1970s in such renowned independent spaces as The Kitchen, Artist’s Space and Franklin Furnace in New York. Since then her work has shown in museums in the U.S. and abroad.
The Super-8 Trilogy was included in the acclaimed Pictures Generation 1974-1984 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 1999.
Beckman's films have screened in such festivals as the New York Film Festival, San Francisco International Film Festival, Rotterdam International Film Festival, and MadCat Film Festival. Her work is in the collections of The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, The Walker Art Center, Le Centre de Georges Pompidou, The British Film Institute, and the Stiftung Kunsthalle Bern. Grants have been received from the Lef Foundation, Artslink, The National Endowment for the Arts, The New York State Council on the Arts and Massachusetts State Council on the Arts.
There is a forthcoming monograph on Beckman’s work to be published in summer 2014. Beckman’s work is also currently featured in Rituals of Rented Island: Object Theater, Loft Performance, and the New Psychodrama—Manhattan, 1970–1980 at the Whitney Museum through February 2, 2014.
She is represented by Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles.
Works 1978 - 2013
8 February - 4 May 2014
Curator: Yves Aupetitallot
American artist Ericka Beckman was trained at CalArts in the mid-1970s. There she met a number of artists, friends and later collaborators, Matt Mullican, James Casebere and Mike Kelley.
Beckman finds inspiration from a number of sources, including the developmental psychology of Jean Piaget, as well as American sport culture, Hollywood films, and 1960’s cartoons. Integrating these sources to her own vivid imagination, Beckman’s films bring to life what she calls “the performance of the image.”
Taking especially from Piaget’s thesis that physical action is the basis of all language, Beckman creates animated games, incorporating their structural elements of rhythm, repetition, verbal chants, and colorful symbolic imagery. In her Super-8 Trilogy, Beckman explores the child’s acquisition of symbolic thought. When the child sets an object in motion, the action becomes a mental image, and once this image is acquired and stable, it establishes a schema of further action.
The sets and props of Beckman’s films are hand-made, and then animated by the use of a stop-motion technique. Ericka Beckman uses a technique called in camera superimposition, where she rewinds the film in the camera and shoots several images on top of each other for each scene.
Using this craft-based process of creating objects, instead of employing newer technologies, gives Beckman the concentration she needs. Without an exact pre-knowledge of how each image will materialize, the possibility of “mistakes” is introduced, and then incorporated into the creative process. This keeps her film making active, performative, and filled with surprise.
“ Film is creating a reality through the makeshift. My films move backwards, using narrative structures, as does the mind of anyone trying to grasp the meaning of images in his memory.
I juxtapose a model of the past, those ‘should have been’ meanings, with the past as remembered, as known to be riddled with mistakes and breeches of meaning. I reconstruct events and places as models to identify the details of a ‘choice’ or to locate the moment a ‘choice’ was available but went by unseized. By recalling the fear evoked by choice, film can fictionalize that fear and provide new consequences." Ericka Beckman, published in the catalogue for Horror Pleni, 1980.
MAGASIN will host Ericka Beckman’s solo exhibition after it has been shown at the Kunsthalle in Berne. She will present a selection of her video works, her photographs and her drawings in MAGASIN’s galleries.
Born in Hampstead, NY in 1951, Ericka Beckman is an artist and filmmaker, living and working in New York.
Graduating from CalArts in 1976, she started to exhibit in the mid-1970s in such renowned independent spaces as The Kitchen, Artist’s Space and Franklin Furnace in New York. Since then her work has shown in museums in the U.S. and abroad.
The Super-8 Trilogy was included in the acclaimed Pictures Generation 1974-1984 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 1999.
Beckman's films have screened in such festivals as the New York Film Festival, San Francisco International Film Festival, Rotterdam International Film Festival, and MadCat Film Festival. Her work is in the collections of The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, The Walker Art Center, Le Centre de Georges Pompidou, The British Film Institute, and the Stiftung Kunsthalle Bern. Grants have been received from the Lef Foundation, Artslink, The National Endowment for the Arts, The New York State Council on the Arts and Massachusetts State Council on the Arts.
There is a forthcoming monograph on Beckman’s work to be published in summer 2014. Beckman’s work is also currently featured in Rituals of Rented Island: Object Theater, Loft Performance, and the New Psychodrama—Manhattan, 1970–1980 at the Whitney Museum through February 2, 2014.
She is represented by Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles.