PULSE New York . March 2011

Beka Goedde

Beka Goedde recently gave me a reading assignment – Andrea Fraser’s 2006 essay “Why Does Fred Sandback’s Work Make Me Cry.” Commissioned for the “Artists on Artists” series at Dia Beacon, the essay uses psychoanalysis and institutional critique to understand why objects and images can evoke visceral reactions, namely tears, even when they are minimal. Fraser speaks of art as inherently incorporating a physical loss that subsequently leads to longing. She investigates this perceived loss and identifies it as an active agent in Sandback’s work, which she describes as “an art of disappearance, as the forms he draws in space appear and disappear as one moves around them. His work has been described as just barely there, verging on invisibility, trembling optically with perceived fragility, mortal in its impermanence.”

Goedde’s work also engages with absence and intangibility. Like Sandback, or Richard Tuttle, she is interested in the moment of transference between an idea and an image, when a sense or feeling becomes visual; the moment an abstract concept becomes a discernable form. Because of this, her work quickly enters a conceptual realm. Trained in philosophy and neuroscience as well as in studio practices, much of her recent work pushes the limits of physical form. In inves-tigating an object, she recreates it repeatedly in order to know it thoroughly, while accepting it as an infinitely mutable object, capable of being scaled to any size and rendered in any medium. She explores its properties as it grows large or small, as it becomes a series of film stills or a blueprint, and as she attempts to realize it in a medium that doesn’t physically exist, such as empty air demar-cated by string, or as negative space.

Focal Length, 2011, mixed media on panel, 8 x 10”

Beka GoeddeThe Moment of Transference

Alongside these explorations, Goedde makes flat works - drawings, collages, works on panel, and prints – that complement her forays into abstraction and theoretical thought while remaining resolved works in their own right, contem-plative and formally pleasing. Goedde speaks of her interest in “shapes that recall architecture but that don’t fit into architecture. They are formed without regard to architectural longevity or strength, building standards, or even grav-ity.” She draws these shapes from memory instead of life. The resulting com-positions are often ambivalent spaces, refusing to commit to being cityscape or interior, industrial or pastoral, aquatic or celestial. They are powered by an internal rhythm created by Goedde’s intricate lines, collaged into many layers of embedded marks, a palimpsest. These lines seem to shimmer and disappear into the ether, reappearing elsewhere. She combines these lines with flat planes of color that sometimes congregate and overlap densely and other times occupy solitary areas, moments of opacity in a layered, transparent surface.

The vocabulary that Goedde creates with the marks and planes of her flat works has a linguistic function as she creates a personal alphabet of forms that operate like signs, standing in for what she calls “direct thought,” thinking without words. She calls these “flashcards in a foreign language” that she is simultaneously in-venting and learning. In this way, her works on paper are dormant expositions waiting to be cracked in the conflated moment where drawing meets writing and non-verbal thought becomes its own image. Richard Tuttle asked in a 1992 interview in BOMB “whether or not language is really at the base of visual art or whether language came along and made such an impact that it changed visual phenomena completely.” Beka Goedde’s work deftly addresses Tuttle’s question by looking at visual phenomena as surpassing words and connecting directly to thought by, as she explains, “allowing thought to have physical space, an actual space on the paper or in the air, instead of just regarding thought to exist through the dimension of time.”

Tamsen Greene

Prediction, 2010, mixed media on panel, 12 x 9”

Name The Scenery, 2011, mixed media on panel, 12.25 x 16”

Play At Being, 2011, mixed media on panel, 24 x 25.25”

The Shape Of Each Sound (Series of 6), 2010, mixed media on paper, 15.75 x 11.75”

Stacks, 2010, pencil and wax crayon on handmade paper, 7.25 x 4.5”Things I Cannot Hold, 2010, mixed media on panel, 7 x 5”

Personal Geometry (Series of 9), 2010, mixed media on paper, 18 x 12”

Chord, 2011, mixed media on panel, 8 x 10”Eight Directions, 2011, mixed media on panel, 8 x 10”

When A Sequence Becomes A Melody, 2011, mixed media on panel, 23 x 24”

The Sound Is Meant To Be Amplified, 2010, mixed media on panel, 12 x 9”

About Beka Goedde

Beka Goedde (b. 1982, Seattle) is a printmaker and sculptor whose work ex-plores the perception of change, duration and the physical body in space. She received a B.A. from Columbia University, Barnard College with a concentration in Behavioral Neuroscience and Philosophy. Goedde has held two solo exhibi-tions at CHRISTINA RAY in New York and has participated in numerous group exhibitions at venues including the International Print Center and Cheim & Read Gallery. In 2010 she was an artist in residence at the Women’s Studio Workshop. She was recently awarded a studio residency at PS122 and will attend the Millay Colony for the Arts in upstate New York this fall.

CHRISTINA RAY is an innovative gallery and creative catalyst in New York whose mission, grounded by the concept of psychogeography, is to discover and present the most important contemporary artists exploring the relationship between people and places.

Shuffle, 2011, mixed media on panel, 8 x 12”

Front cover: A Glacial Turning (detail), 2011, mixed media on panel, 12.25 x 16”Back cover: Things I Can Hold (detail), 2010, mixed media on panel, 5 x 7”

30 Grand Street . Ground Floor . New York, NY 10013between Thompson St./6th Ave . subway A/C/E to Canalhours: Wednesday–Sunday, 12-6pm . phone: 212.334.0204web: www.christinaray.com . email: info@christinaray.com

March 03–06, 2011Metropolitan Pavilion . 125 West 18th Streetwww.pulse-art.com

Booth B–2