Amy Beecher: Lifestyle Pictures

January 26th – February 16th, 2023

Opening Reception January 26th 5-7 pm

The Dorrance H. Hamilton Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of artist Amy Beecher’s solo show Lifestyle Pictures.  An opening reception with short artist talk is scheduled for the artist on Thursday, January 26th, at 5 p.m.

Lifestyle Pictures represents the newest collection of artist Amy Beecher’s digital paintings and photographs. Beecher composes from an archive of found and original photographic and painterly assets and feeds them into a script to create an endless array of complex and chance compositions. Included in this archive are staged photographs, produced on a set decorated to evoke a generic and gentrified domestic imaginary: yoga blocks, begonia plants, beige couches and Beecher and her young child. The archive also includes an array of domestic detritus from her own home-including toddler boogers and the odd household dust bunny. The resulting compositions evoke equally the aspirational vision boards ubiquitous on social media, early modernist geometric abstraction. Beecher herself has discussed her work as a kind of “wine mom glitch abstraction.”

Leaves and vistas are flattened by Mondrian-inspired grids. Enormous chicks emerge from behind gigantic exercise bands. In photographs Beecher images herself working on digital collages, sometimes alone, sometimes with her son, eschewing The Studio for a kitchen table, a living room floor. Beecher pushes us to examine the poetics of the banal through the lens of a digital painter alongside her daily home life and routine. The humor of the work comes in its willingness to thumb its nose at serious painting in favor of a kind of deliberately faulty facture, hiding the sure hand of a painter schooled in the misadventures of modernism behind the digital glitch of a system she designs.  Lifestyle Pictures is at its heart both a meditation on digital painting and documentation of a marriage, a domestic life, a space curated and repackaged. What is formal picture making here and what is emotional?  What is produced by Beecher herself, and what emerges from larger systems? Beecher asks questions of the formal space of the gallery as well as the studio, making it all her personal vision board, but slant.

Amy Beecher is a visual artist living between Southern Vermont and New York City. She creates immersive installations that combine image, performance, and text. In 2020 she joined the faculty of Emerson College as Assistant Professor of Visual Art and Media Studies. Beecher’s work has been presented nationally through exhibitions and public programs at  Hesse Flatow, The International Center for Photography, Creative Time, Printed Matter, Bruce High Quality Foundation, Eye Level BQE Gallery, and Muelensteen Gallery, all in New York, NY; Torrance Shipman Gallery, 7 Dunham Place, Garden Party Arts and Primetime, all in Brooklyn, NY; GRIN and Providence College-Galleries, both in Providence, RI; The New Art Center, Newton, MA; Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, NY; and Philadelphia Photo Arts Center and Tiger Strikes Asteroid, both in Philadelphia, PA. She has been a fellow in interdisciplinary art at The Macdowell Colony, Peterborough, NH and an artist-in-residence at The New Art Center, Newton, MA, The Shandaken Project, Shandaken, NY and the Digital Media Center for Art at Yale University, New Haven, CT.  Her podcast, a growing archive of dialogues with other artists from 2013 onward, is The Amy Beecher Show.

The Dorrance H. Hamilton Gallery is located in the Antone Academic Center on the campus of Salve Regina. It is handicap accessible with parking along Lawrence Avenue and Leroy Avenue. Its exhibits are open to the public Tuesdays and Thursdays from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Wednesdays and Fridays from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; and Saturdays and Sundays from Noon to 4 p.m. The gallery is closed on Mondays.