EXHIBITION & GALLERY VISIT AT KOLAJ FEST NEW ORLEANS 2023
“Dave Beech: When the news hit shore”
with Tony Campbell at the U.N.O. St. Claude Gallery
LEARN MORE | REGISTER FOR KOLAJ FEST NEW ORLEANS
Kolaj Fest New Orleans is a multi-day festival and symposium about contemporary collage and its role in art, culture, and society, 7-11 June 2023. Visit the website to learn more, see an overview of the program, and register to attend.
Dave Beech was born into a working class community in northwest England in the mid-1960s. He was the first member of his family to go to university. Lacking the cultural capital that art students tended to demonstrate, he compensated by spending a greater and greater proportion of his time in the library. His preference for the library over the studio initially led to him becoming a theoretically supercharged artist, but since 2017 he has turned his office into a studio that is both a library of picture books and a space to make photomontages from them.
Beech makes montages from photographs cut out of an archive of books that he collects from second-hand bookshops. Books are one of the ways in which photos pass into the world as things to be carried, held, moved, stored, owned, gifted, cherished, thumbed and passed around. Sourcing photobooks from charity shops and second hand bookshops means collecting pictures that were once owned by diverse members of the community. The second hand bookshop is a vernacular library or archive. They often show traces of their locale–local history books, local authors, local industries, etc. but also contain books about foreign travel, international events, the natural world and anthropological studies. These montages, therefore, are a portrait of that community through a representation of its interests, values, preferences, fascinations and biases. Beech uses photobooks as an archive of people, places, events and things that are more than isolated facts when they are combined, aggregated, organized and interwoven into new patterns, new relations and new narratives. This is a practice of making meaning and storytelling in which the narrator is missing and therefore the viewer is invited to construct the links themselves either from their own knowledge of events or from great imaginative leaps.
At Kolaj Fest New Orleans, Tony Campbell, Director and Curator of the U.N.O. St Claude Gallery, will speak about Dave Beech’s collage work and lead a tour of the exhibition.
Kolaj Fest New Orleans is a multi-day festival and symposium about contemporary collage and its role in art, culture, and society, 7-11 June 2023. Visit the website to learn more, see an overview of the program, and register to attend.