Please join us at an open house for Amanda Beech, artist-in-residence, and for an artist’s talk about her practice and the long-term project she is developing as part of her residency in Joshua Tree. There will be a screening of past work followed by an opportunity for q&a.

Amanda is an artist and writer and works with video, installation, print and painting. Her work has explored the intersecting themes of groundlessness, freedom, chaos, contingency and equality in different strands of culture, politics and philosophy and how these ideas have served as mythic ‘grounds’ from which to build ‘truths’. 
The desert of Joshua Tree provides a classic context to test mythologies that perpetuate notions of freedom and change, since the desert is often romanticized as a site of ‘the real’. Beech’s residency explores how we live with these myths that seem to be permanent but are also invented by us. To do this, her work at Joshua Tree looks to the relations between the systems that are used for communication and the content of the communications themselves, asking if the latter can ever change the former. Her work explores how we can construct new forms of knowledge… how meaning is produced and judgement takes place, in a world where we have no real criteria for its construction, and where habits, patterns and traditions seem to fill this void with an impenetrability. 

Amanda Beech is an artist and writer living in Los Angeles. Drawing from popular culture, critical philosophy and real events, her work manifests in different media, including critical writing, video installation, drawing, print, and sculpture. Using a range of compelling richly rhetorical and often dogmatic narratives and texts, Beech’s work poses questions and propositions for what a realist art can be in today’s culture.

Beech has shown her artwork and presented her writing at major international venues including Covenant Transport Move or Die at The Baltic Center for Contemporary Art, 2016, and Sanity Assassin, in Neocentric, at Charim Gallery, Vienna, Austria 2016. Other recent work includes her contributions to What Hope Looks Like After Hope, Homeworks VII Beirut City Forum, Ashkal Alwan, Beirut, Lebanon, 2015, Bots, Bodies and Beasts, at the Gerrit Rietveld Akademie, Amsterdam, 2015; Speculative Aesthetics, Tate Britain, 2015, and the presentation of the three channel video installation Final Machine at both Agitationism, the Irish Biennial 2014, and L’Avenir, Montreal Biennale, 2014. Beech’s published writing includes essays for the anthologies Speculative Aesthetics, (Urbanomic, 2014) Realism, Materialism, Art, (Sternberg Press, 2015), and contributions for the Irish and the Montreal Biennales’ catalogues. Her artist’s books include  First Machine, Final Machine, 2015 (LPG), Final Machine, 2013 (Urbanomic), and Sanity Assassin, 2010 (Urbanomic). Beech is Dean of Critical Studies at CalArts, California, USA. 

Artist Website: http://amandabeech.com