Rollin Beamish

I have had a visceral interest in the pictorial throughout my life - with its allusive possibilities as well as its vulnerability. This is due most likely to my upbringing in suburban Ohio, an environment that I found simulacral in the extreme. Painting and drawing have always had an allure in that these were images that were overtly constructed by hand and thought, a refreshing counterpoint to the “reality effect” of the consumer media landscape. Paintings also have possibilities as odd, hybrid “image-objects” that add a layer of resonance in contradistinction to the variety of images rooted in an interface (from screens to pages to billboards); interfaces that we as viewers are invited to ignore, and from which media images seem to float. The “anchored” quality of paintings as images “other-than”, along with their peculiar relationship to time or duration, are aspects of the discipline that I remain keenly interested in, despite any changes my work has undergone.

Conceptually, my work has remained consistently reflective of the problematic space of Western mass (consumer) culture and our relative lack of agency as subjects within that context, as simultaneous prisoners of and (un)willing participants in our dominant ideological structure.”