blanks | 2018-20 | photography
“Blanks” begin with photographing a white sheet of glossy photographic paper, capturing reflective traces of the studio environment and camera. The photograph is printed and re-photographed under glass, occasionally embellished with white spray paint. This process is repeated a number of times such that the resulting image is a composite of multiple photographs. Beck begins with an empty subject and dilates the photographic moment until the studio itself functions as an apparatus for the creation of a new abstract space. While the “Blanks” owe much to modernist painting and structuralism—they at turns recall Alvin Lucier, Robert Ryman, Cy Twombly, Jan Dibbets, and Michael Snow—they toggle between digital and analog, painting and photography, system and accident, and image and architecture with an elegant insouciance. These are “pictures of nothing” that are nonetheless documents of specific times in specific places with a specific quality of light.
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