AMANDA BEECH: Constructing Time | Talk + Screening
Critical Distance Centre for Curators and SAW Video Media Art Centre, in partnership with Equitable Bank and Pleasure Dome, are pleased to present an artist talk and screening followed by a celebratory reception with LA-based artist, writer, and Dean of Critical Studies at CalArts, Amanda Beech.
Beech has presented her work at major international venues including Tate Britain, The Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, and Remai Modern. For her talk, she will speak on the main themes that have mobilized her practice, focusing on how the relation between art and power is constructed in the choreographing of time. The machinations of time-based art have often led it to privilege ‘the open’ and to identify art with the future as an indeterminate potentiality. This means that it has often rejected any regulative principles that would provide a sense of determination for a future. But this rejection still formats a future that is present to us, and often this has proved unsatisfactory in meeting our political aspirations. Beech will also delve into how the ordering of time in sequence, assemblage, montage and abstraction can offer the construction of another sense-experience of time as well as craft the possibility for another, future, time and space.
Tickets to this special event are free upon request thanks to our presenting partners, SAW Video Media Arts Centre (Ottawa), Equitable Bank, and Pleasure Dome. Please send your full name and number of tickets requested to rsvp (at) criticaldistance (dot) ca — seating is limited, so be sure to reserve early!
The talk and screening will be held at Small World Music, Suite 101 at Artscape Youngplace, 180 Shaw Street btw Dundas+Queen, Toronto, M6J 2W5. A reception with the artist will follow immediately thereafter; refreshments will be served and all are welcome.
This special event is presented in relation to the exhibition Public Syntax, curated by SAW Video Programming Director Neven Lochhead and installed in-gallery at Critical Distance and across three floors of public space at Artscape Youngplace. Public Syntax will be extended one final evening, from 6–10pm, to allow event attendees to experience the exhibition. Building, theatre, and all installations are wheelchair accessible.
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ABOUT THE ARTIST
Amanda Beech has presented her work at major international venues including; This Time, a video commission for the Remai Modern, SK, 2017; Covenant Transport, Move or Die at The Baltic Center for Contemporary Art, UK, 2016; and Sanity Assassin, in Neocentric, at Charim Gallery, Vienna, 2016.
Other recent work includes her contributions to Art Margins, 2018 with the comic Realism and its Discontents; What Hope Looks Like After Hope, Homeworks VII Beirut City Forum, Lebanon, 2015; Bots, Bodies and Beasts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam, 2015; Speculative Aesthetics, Tate Britain, London, 2015; and the presentation of the three-channel video installation Final Machine at both Agitationism, the Irish Biennial 2014, and L’Avenir, Montreal Biennale, 2014. Currently she is the Dean of Critical Studies, California Institute of the Arts in Santa Clarita, California.
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Critical Distance and SAW Video Media Arts Centre thank Equitable Bank and Pleasure Dome for their support in making this event possible.
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image: Amanda Beech, Final Machine (still/detail from 3 channel video installation), 2013