Beth Waldman
Inevitable Entails 2020
My work echoes my decades long practice of walking through cities and nature alike observing and transforming elements from landscape into a unique visual language leading with the poetic and aesthetic while entrenched within a social framework via my photography. In my art, I uses my own source imagery from my international travels as the foundation for my work that I deconstruct and interweave with select media. My navigations through space explore the shifting perspectives, indications of a search for memory and the loss of it, and the psychological aspect of space within the framework of “home”. My artwork becomes political through my manipulation of my source images, captured for their indications laden with social and economic content. My work implies displacement, disaster and disintegration exploring what the price of prosperity is to the individual and to culture. “Inevitable Entails” presenting a mixed tension of a dystopian nature that is so applicable in today’s current context. Began in 2018 and completed in 2020 during the early weeks of Shelter in Place, these works on hand primed canvas are created using a gel photo transfer process and acrylic paint. My use of photo transfer is experimental to initiate tearing and to accentuate the resulting skin like texture speaking to the human condition. Paint embraces the forms resulting from the tears highlighting the inevitable entails of global urban conditions. These works highlight the complex systems of communication in these dense urban landscapes to speak to the irony of human intimacy and isolation of these shifting conditions.
