Walead Beshty: POPULAR MECHANICS

Opening Reception: Tuesday, March 3rd 6-8pm

With both a sharp and laconic aesthetic sensibility Beshty creates a photography of uncertainty Cutting across several media, including photograms a representative example of the range of Beshty’s program Clever if somewhat vague referents presented as a subtly posed but effective arguments Beshty inserts himself into the historical flow But beware of the theoretical undertow Photographs are created with very clear prescriptions read as luminous abstract compositions But have a roughed up texture that says all you need to know One can make much, perhaps too much, of Walead Beshty’s show Beshty has included within the exhibition an assistant who toils like an art-world Rumpelstiltskin This piece by Walead Beshty is briefly amusing An accident that suggested the idea of deliberately using A revised concept of site specificity, now proposed as a function Investigating systems of dispersal and production Whatever Marxist schadenfreude might be gleaned from black-and-white Effectively reclaims the found object as a multivalent political site Of the show’s relaxed attitude toward lines of demarcation which, sexy as it sounded, felt like little more than rhetorical lubrication Among the most special is Walead Beshty’s photo-slide meditation Here flashy surface need not come at the cost of art historical, conceptual, and socio-political elaboration.

Walead Beshty (b. 1976, London, UK) currently has work on view in Altermodern: Tate Triennial 2009, curated by Nicolas Bourriaud, at Tate Britain, and will participate in New Photography 2009, curated by Eva Respini, at The Museum of Modern Art in September. He has upcoming solo exhibitions at The University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor; The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; and LAXART, Los Angeles. This will be Beshty’s third solo show at Wallspace.

Walead Beshty
POPULAR MECHANICS