SANTA FE, NM.- A unique survey exhibition, Across the Surface by John Beech, will open at Charlotte Jackson Fine Art on May 29 and extend through June 27. An Opening Reception with the artist will be held on Friday, May 29 from 5-7 p.m. On Saturday, May 30 from 2 to 4 pm Charlotte Jackson Fine Art is pleased to present, "A Conversation with John Beech and David Chickey". The gallery is located in the Railyard Arts District at 554 South Guadalupe Street.

They are not just black and white photos. The subject matter is urban: city streets, industrial sites, alleyways, warehouse facades. Within them is the accumulated flotsam and jetsam of human life in a city: dumpsters, random pieces of abandoned furniture, bits construction equipment. But each photo is also ground for the artist's intervention. In some pieces like Photo-Painting #202, Berlin, paint covers over the shape of what might, in another context, be called the "subject" of the photo - blue brushstrokes coating a hexagonal dumpster. In others, like Photo Painting #193, Del Monte Center, Monterey, thick goldenrod paint covers over the entire background of the image, stripping away context. In still others, like Faux-brick Dumpster, 52nd Street, Manhattan, the interventions take a different tact, with marks of red as well as tape, staples, and ink scratched across the surface.

We humans take things for granted: a street, a chair, the passage of time. Wandering the world with our heads bent down over our phones, lost inside a digital, two-dimensional maze of news and noise, our senses and bodies left behind, our minds overwhelmed by information, how long since we really experienced that alley, that tree, that sky?

This is the opportunity that art grants us: a chance to realign ourselves, reconnect with our senses and our proprioceptive experience of moving through the world. Art, aesthetic experience, lights up multiple regions of our brains, including the default mode network that normally only runs during introspective moments like daydreaming or memory. It is a truly unique state that allows humans to thrive. As Susan Magsamen of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine says, "In fact, the science shows we’re neurobiologically wired for these kinds of experiences, and they contribute to our health and well-being." Art complexifies and connects us with the world.

The Photo-Paintings and Monotypes of John Beech do just this. They challenge our preconceptions, providing the jolt, the pause, that invites us to pay closer attention. These works confound our sense of what a photo is, what a painting is, and how we see art and the world. Across the Surface provides a survey of Beech's Photo-Paintings and Monotypes from across the decades and dovetails with the announcement of a new book about this particular body of work forthcoming from Radius Books in spring 2027.

The series of work that became the Photo-Paintings evolved over about a decade. Beech first studied photography while at school at UC Berkeley in 1986. In the late 90's when Beech moved to New York City, he began to take photos of the industrial streets of Brooklyn, mostly as a way to get to know his new home. During that time, he stumbled on the faux-brick dumpster in Manhattan, as he says, "trying to camouflage itself against a brick wall." That photo inspired his particular interest in photographing dumpsters. It resonated with the container sculpture work that he was already doing which merged a minimalist aesthetic influenced by Judd and Serra, with a "basic utility vernacular." Beech found dumpsters fascinating for their unique placement within human life and landscape. As he says, "A dumpster on the street has a certain insistent presence and right to be, wherever it is found. I liked this conviction and found it all the more intriguing that a dumpster concurrently tends to be overlooked, not noticed."

This way of describing the ubiquitous dumpster provides a bit of a skeleton key into Beech's work. Beech's art seems to dance along the edge of this particular dynamic, bridging categories and seeming opposites: high and low, familiar and strange, old and new, clear and hidden, homely and aesthetic, painting and photo. It brings together expected and unexpected in ways that allow the viewer to see anew and to experience a whole beyond the sum of these disparate parts.

Across the Surface brings together a broad view of Beech's work from forty years. Coming into the gallery from the streets outside (asphalt, train tracks, traffic lights, adobe facades), the viewer has the chance to put away her phone, take a deep breath, and feel for that spark of connection to ignite from the aesthetic contradictions and surprises that Beech has created. Sink in. Who knows how this might change you? As Beech has said, "Art is a meditation on the nature of reality and therefore not an act of distraction from reality."

For More Information:

Charlotte Jackson Fine Art
554 South Guadalupe
Santa Fe, NM 87501
press@charlottejackson.com
505-989-8688
fax 505-989-9898


John Beech, Photo-Painting #201, Olmsted Road, Monterey, JB0191, 2023, oil paint, digital photograph, canvas, wood panel, 24.25x30x1.75in