AMANDA BEECH

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; that is, a work that can articulate a comprehension of reality without the terminal mirror of a human identity that is used to picture it.

Here, the machinery of consensus building, the construction of beliefs, the traversal from fiction to fact, and the deep substrata of ideologies that make life meaningful are extended to new abstract realist fictions of how the world can be explained by extruding these from our familiar cultural, political, visual, and pragmatic experiences.

The works speak to themes of inequality, the myths of artistic practice, and the future of a world that has surpassed the need for neo-liberal capital. These worlds are not redemptive, but offer a view to other forms of consensus, other forms of power and other value systems. The work asks specific questions about how ideas form the world, how they change them, and, most significantly, how the concepts that grip us manifest in material form.

Amanda Beech has exhibited her artwork internationally, Covenant Transport Move or Die, a five channel video work was exhibited at the SAW Video, Ottowa, the Baltic Center of Contemporary Art, 2016-7 and Beirut City Forum, Ashkal Alwan, 2015. Final Machine, a large scale video installation was also presented at Agitationism, the Irish Biennial 2014, andL’Avenir, Montreal Biennale, 2014. Beech’s 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), Sanity Assassin, 2010 (Urbanomic) and she has published multiple essays on-line. Beech is Dean of Critical Studies at CalArts, California, USA.