Ann Beam, At the Horse Washing Waterfall (after Hokusai), 2011. Acrylic and photo-transfer on recycled corrugated paper with birch and cedar bark on panel, 2.74 x 3.65 m.
Ann Beam’s virtuosic painted constructions, arranged along the walls of the Tom Thomson Art Gallery in her solo exhibition “Ann Beam: The Engine Room,” which closed in early January, offered one of the best reasons to go to Owen Sound this winter.
It is hard to be neutral about Beam’s aggressively expressive objects, whose surfaces are mashed-up combinations of materials and imagery, found objects and signs that pound out thundering decibels of visual static in entirely pleasing and surprising ways. Beam harnesses the dynamic juxtapositions of matter and images. Agglomerations of materials cascade over her surfaces. Torn cardboard, bark, paint, a deer skull, a window, a wheel, a branch: all this stuff is arranged in crusted collages to create strange approximations of places and the radiating energies that animate them.
Her purpose is to transport viewers into charged up, vibrant fields that belt forth from her complex creations. She tells us that, in aggregate, the paintings speak of transformation. They overwhelm with visual and tactile stimulation—all the better to communicate her unique vision that blends a deep appreciation of her environment with a finely tuned recognition of its immutable aspects.
The exhibition pivots on the fulcrum of dynamic polarities, usually represented as the contrast between light and dark grounds, that serve as organic fields from which she allows archetypes—shadowy horses, rainbows, images of earth from space—to emerge and recede. In the creative process, Beam leaves room for channelling her unconscious and applying its traces on these things—more perceptual windows—which throb into the space in front of them and embrace a collective mind that includes the viewers’ and which gives her work context and resonance.
There are many visual languages at work all at the same time, as images, signs, phrases and collisions of formal materials tell us in a harsh, discordant chorus—reinforced by chance phrases that can be read on the objects’ surfaces—that “imagination is more important than knowledge,” and that “peoples (human) development is (the) new economy.”
Dense and dazzling, Beam’s At the Horse Washing Waterfall (after Hokusai) (2011) is precocious, witty and audacious. She “paints” with ripped birch bark, cedar strips, recycled corrugated cardboard and a broken branch, and gives a startling multi-sensory experience punctuated by a photo-transfer of the artist washing her horse (named “Mystery”) in a waterfall. As an emblem, it is apt and poetic. “Engine Room” is a generator of preternatural images and extraordinary, singular, uncommon objects.
This is a review from the Winter 2014 issue of Canadian Art. To read more from this issue, please visit its table of contents. To read the entire issue, pick up a copy on newsstands, the App Store or Zinio until March 14.
