Jarrod Beck
Jarrod Beck
Workspace Program Resident 2015
During my year in residence at Dieu Donné, I was also traveling to my land in far west Texas, where I’ve been creating an installation of cast plaster in the ground called Disruption Regime. Each year heavy rains bring sediment into this desert wash and the plaster I’ve placed deflects the silt, creating a drawing in the ground. I would come back to New York and get to work in the wet studio, eventually developing a process of throwing thinned out pulp at a mold and then using my arm to pull and rub the pulp across the mesh of the mold. I have been looking for ways to show the desert ground-drawings without photographs, and I see these works in paper as a medium to transmit the process, rather than an image, and to shift the scale from a fleeting experience of walking five acres of land, seeing thousands of acres, and tens thousands of years in the compacted sediment in the mesas and mountains that surround the property to an experience of several square feet of color and translucency that’s here now, indelibly in front of you.
Each layer of these works marks a gesture, an index of the frisson between my arm and the architectural surface of the mold. Couching these layers together gives them strength and they depend on one another for permanence. I’ve used pigment in the pulp to differentiate between layers of these pressed-together gestures, mixing up the figure from the ground, using tones to pull texture toward you and pushing it back with veils of fiber. I’ve continued this gestural work back at my studio using pigmented cotton pulp and theatre scrim stretched across the studio. The cold of being third, in the front room of the gallery, is indicative of this scale, allowing me use the full range of my body to throw the pulp into space. The force presses the pulp into the mesh, and the wet muck of it traps and slows lumps of pulp that roll down these surfaces attached to the walls and makeshift frames I build for them.
This process, like all good stories, started in the basement. Lisa Switalski, the Studio Collaborator with whom I worked on these pieces, was extremely generous in sharing her knowledge with me, aiding my research into plant fibers for paper, which brought me from the deep dark corners of boxes of forgotten fiber in the Dieu Donné storeroom to the the yucca-studded land of a cattle rancher in the Texas panhandle. I am indebted to Lisa for her careful attention to my intuitive way of working and to her dedication to the finished works. During our studio days Lisa and I would often pause and look at the floor and see a work we wish we could catch: what you see here is just the part of the work that would fit on the mold. Thanks to the entire staff at Dieu Donné for their support and enthusiasm during what could sometimes be an immersive installation of wet pulp in the studio. The door that was opened to me here has challenged me as an artist and will remain hugely impactful on my process and progress.
— Jarrod Beck, 2015
In the Studio
About the Artist
Jarrod Beck received a Masters in Architecture degree from Tulane University and a MFA from the University of Texas at Austin. Beck has been an artist-in-residence at Urban Glass, Dieu Donné, MacDowell Colony, Fine Arts Work Center, Yaddo, Sculpture Space, Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, Lower East Side Printshop, Vermont Studio Center, Siena Art Institute and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. His collaborations include a series of prints and a score for sculpture created with the choreographer Will Rawls, an installation created for performance artist John Kelly’s Love of a Poet, and a series of prop-sculptures for the choreographer Jon Kinzel.
He has created outdoor sculptures for Socrates Sculpture Park (Astoria, NY), Sara D. Roosevelt Park (NY, NY), Calder Plaza (Grand Rapids, MI) and the Anti-Defamation League (Omaha, NE); installations at Wave Hill, South Street Seaport Museum, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Instituto Cervantes, Rhode Island School of Design, Stony Brook University, Universidad Central de Venezuela, Cape Cod National Seashore and the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. His drawings are in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. The artist lives and works in California. (Source: Artist’s website)
For more information, please visit their website: https://jarrodcharlesbeck.com