Doug Beube: Mining the Medium
New York Artist, Doug Beube has been a regular in our fifteen years of The Art of the Book exhibitions at Seager Gray Gallery. We are pleased to be showing three very different examples of his process. He created this virtual studio visit to showcase the works.
“Travel Ban” is a bookwork based on a similar piece conceived in 1982 entitled, Writer’s Block. Three blue graphite pencils penetrate a small leather bound atlas. Where the pencils enter and exit the front and back covers, drops of red paint drip down that simulate blood. The pencils hold the book shut, a form of censorship, where the contents of essential map locations for travel destinations are censored. The piece alludes to the selective immigration ban that Donald Trump attempts to keep in place preventing a number of individuals from those countries from entering the United States.
The “DC: De/Constructing Washington” collages appear to be worm-eaten, a series using vintage postcards of the state capitol. As a metaphor, a closer look by the viewer reveals that below each surface is another ravaged decline of the White House, the State Capital, the Library of Congress and other federal landmarks for example. Barely visible underneath the first layer is another collapsing building and so forth. The reverse side of each postcard has text that is eroded by using a belt sander. These are erasures to eradicate the highly recognizable monuments. Grinding the backside away until the desired effect is achieved is an active form of drawing by reduction. This manner of drawing is opposite to building up an image using graphite or pen and ink. Making numerous curved gestures on the reverse side of the original image stresses the paper until it becomes veil like. A controlled chaos is achieved but carefully eliminates parts of the recognizable image. The gaps or negative spaces are as important as the parts of the image that remain. The final stacked image is complete when it intrusively resonates as an altered portrait of the current political chaos of the present administration.
In “Scallop,” the artist looks at the book as an inter-connecting block of wood. The codex, which, in Latin, literally means wooden block, is undeviating in its essential, expected and historical form. Undeniably it is limited in its capacity to store and generate information in the digital age compared to a computer. Beube exploits the inflexibility of the codex both theoretically and physically by ‘excavating’ the book as if the physical elements and text block becomes malleable and functions as an archaeological site or cadaver to be studied and sliced. By cutting, crushing, drawing, drilling, gouging and stitching, to mention a few actions he perpetrates upon books, he physically manipulates the outdated modality and pushes its physical properties until it almost falls apart, creating a new sculpture, recognizable as coming from a book, but with new associations and a pleasing aesthetic all their own.
Doug Beube is a mixed-media artist working in bookwork, collage, installation, sculpture and photography. He has a BFA from York University in Toronto, ON and an MFA in photography from the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY. He regularly lectures on his work and exhibits both nationally and internationally. In 2011 a monograph entitled, Doug Beube: Breaking the Codex was published. David Revere McFadden, former chief curator of the Museum of Art and Design in New York City, wrote the introduction along with several well known art historians and critics who wrote in-depth essays about his thirty year art practice. In 2016 I received a Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant to pursue his work.
