Tad Beck
Tad Beck's work explores photography’s possibilities by exaggerating its failure to capture or mirror “the real.” Many of his works employ rephotography (making photographs of photographs), either by having subjects reenact previous imagery or by aiming the camera at photographic prints themselves. Rephotography collapses multiple images and multiple points in time, complicating what Cartier-Bresson called the “decisive moment.” The artist's subjects and their surroundings produce initial, straightforward meanings, but the details (resulting from an iterative process of taking, making, and remaking), destabilize, upset, and multiply their interpretive possibilities. Performance (as both concept and practice), art history, queerness, and (an often humorous) eroticism all recur in various series. The body—as object of desire and study for Beck, as an engine of unstable, context-dependent meaning—dominates. After more than 30 years of taking photographs, Beck continues to be fascinated by what a camera can do—documenting, abstracting, transforming, and extending moments and ideas.
TAD BECK
Beck received a B.F.A. in Photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 1991, and an M.F.A. in Fine Art from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California in 2003. Beck’s solo exhibitions include: the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in California; …
Tad Beck's work explores photography’s possibilities by exaggerating its failure to capture or mirror “the real.” Many of his works employ rephotography (making photographs of photographs), either by having subjects reenact previous imagery or by aiming the camera at photographic prints themselves. Rephotography collapses multiple images and multiple points in time, complicating what Cartier-Bresson called the “decisive moment.” The artist's subjects and their surroundings produce initial, straightforward meanings, but the details (resulting from an iterative process of taking, making, and remaking), destabilize, upset, and multiply their interpretive possibilities. Performance (as both concept and practice), art history, queerness, and (an often humorous) eroticism all recur in various series. The body—as object of desire and study for Beck, as an engine of unstable, context-dependent meaning—dominates. After more than 30 years of taking photographs, Beck continues to be fascinated by what a camera can do—documenting, abstracting, transforming, and extending moments and ideas.
TAD BECK
Beck received a B.F.A. in Photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 1991, and an M.F.A. in Fine Art from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California in 2003. Beck’s solo exhibitions include: the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in California; The Fisher Center at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; Samuel Freeman Gallery in Santa Monica; Marisa Del Re Gallery in New York; Nathalie Karg Gallery in New York; the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockland; and Grant Wahlquist Gallery. Recent two-person exhibitions include collaborative works made with the artist Jennifer Locke at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions in California, and an exhibition with Diana Cherbuliez at Theodore:Art, in Brooklyn. Group exhibitions include: Fotofest International in Houston; CFHILL Art Space in Stockholm; Spritmuseum in Stockholm; the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts; the Portland Museum of Art in Maine; the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts; the Ogunquit Museum of Art in Maine; Apex Art in New York; Rupert Goldsworthy Gallery in New York; Debs & Co. in New York; Castelli Gallery in New York; Jancar Gallery in Los Angeles; and Monte Vista Projects in Los Angeles. His work is in the collections of the Addison Gallery of American Art, LACMA, the Portland Museum of Art in Maine, the Worcester Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and Emily Fisher Landau. He lives and works in Vinalhaven, Maine.
Courtesy of the Artist
