FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact:
Andrew Rafacz
Keith Couser
312-421-6993
info@bucketridergallery.com
www.bucketridergallery.com
BUCKET RIDER GALLERY continues the summer season with new paintings and video by Jon Beasley.
Chicago, IL, June 9, 2006
Bucket Rider welcomes the second solo exhibition of new painting and video by Jon Beasley, entitled Monkey Painting. The show opens Friday, June 9th with an artist’s reception from 6 to 8pm, and continues through July 15th.
Monkey Painting continues Beasley’s exploration of the indeterminate narrative and how it brings you to certain philosophical investigations. In the project room, the artist has installed an anonymous, found video of a very young child painting with two adults at a kitchen table. Without any background on the context of the video, the viewer is unsure of the intentions or behaviors of its subjects. At times there are suggestions that the child is mentally disabled, desperately trying to connect with the adults around him. At other moments he seems completely indifferent to them and only concerned with the painting in front of him. The walls of the project room are covered in figurative and abstract paintings that are directly connected to the narrative and place in the film.
As a counterpoint to the emotional and physical density of the project room, the main gallery is minimally installed with a small, dark portrait of a monkey and a series of photographs of gorillas and the artist himself.
Beasley’s hermeneutic investigations into the limits of authorship and interpretation frame the narrative of his exhibition. Beginning with a video whose author is unknown and whose subject struggles to communicate, he investigates the language that makes us human, revealing that art making is often at the limits of communication.
Los Angeles based artists Jon Beasley was born in Montgomery, Alabama in 1975 and studied film production and theory at Columbia College. He continues to make work in all media and collaborates with fellow L.A. artist Chandler McWilliams as PLAZA, exploring the role of emerging technologies, interactivity and the creation of ‘living’ works of art in contemporary culture. He will be accompanying L.A. based artist Lita Albuquerque and the National Science Foundation’s Artists and Writers Program on an expedition to Antarctica this coming winter. There, he will be making a new film and collaborating with Albuquerque on her new project. Beasley’s work has recently been exhibited at the Frederick R. Weisman museum and in C.O.L.A. 2006. His drawings were seen at the ICO museum in Madrid, Spain during ARCO and at FIAC in Paris and AQUA in Miami in 2005. This is his second solo show with Bucket Rider Gallery, after The Path in October 2004.