Exhibition General Photography Solo artist

Walead Beshty: A Partial Disassembling of an Invention Without a Future: Helter-Skelter and Random Notes in Which the Pulleys and Cogwheels Are Lying Around at Random All Over the Workbench

posted by Tessa Lawer December 14, 2014

Walead Beshty is a London born artist, writer and professor. Beshty’s immersive takeover of the “Barbican curve” is the culmination of a year’s worth of print making and comprises over 12,000 separate cyanotypes. Distinctive in their rich blue colouring, cyanotypes are the product of a seminal photographic process. It is a palpable practise by which natural sunlight can be used to expose an image to varying degrees.

Having started out in Los Angeles, Beshty concluded the project by undertaking a month long residency at the Barbican. Each print is a silhouette of an object that has played a part in his studio practise. Thus the work creates a cyclical narrative of printing, aiming to account for everything involved in producing the work itself. Incorporating notes, scraps of paper and seemingly mundane objects the installation can be read as a visual timeline cataloging the artists geographical and temporal locations.

As scissors are for cutting, each raw imprint is a trace of a particular act. En mass the images represent the prolific nature of printing as a system.