beachcomber

krank art gallery - february 15 - march 24, 2018

Beler’s newly constructed surfaces are formed by the visual and text-based information that seeps through the holes that she produces by combing her phone and the Internet. “Combing” here by no means refers to researching or looking for things. Rather, there is a very refreshing active passivity in Beler’s artistic process; she lets things happen, she lets things find her, she lets things change her. It is within this at times violent serendipity that Beler’s visual vocabulary finds itself—as viewers, we recognize almost everything that we see, but they are removed from our realm and are now constituents of a new place. This is not dissimilar to watching someone leave your house—the umbrella, the glove that was just next to you suddenly becomes something that you view through a window, isolating to the point of self-alienation.

The distances between the viewer, the objects, the subjects, the artist are constantly re-negotiated in Beler’s works. There is a discomfort of her not letting things settle and be sedentary that echoes in the viewing experience. The recognition of everything that we see as familiar place our bodies within the images while the obsessive painting of photographs place us on the threshold, not knowing whether we’d want to be a part of this act of perversion. The spread of the images across the space make us hyper-aware of our architectural relationship to the images, removing us from the realm of our screens and pulling us into an environment controlled and populated by the artist’s images. read more