scrying | 2024 | video
two channel video installation
Scrying is a two-channel video installation presented on vintage projection screens surrounded by vintage chairs. The installation features two of Beck’s childhood hand puppets, one sporting a wizard’s hat in front of an array of seemingly occult objects, the other in front of a bookshelf displaying texts and catalogues on the work of Beck’s artistic forebears (Kelley, Charlesworth, Zoe Leonard, Roni Horn, and more). These two characters engage in what at first appears to be a discourse on the nature of divination, as the lines spoken by the puppet in the wizard’s hat are in fact appropriated from online scrying tutorials. However, students of the history of photography will quickly observe that the lines spoken by the yellow puppet in front of the bookcase are modifications of quotes from seminal 20th Century texts on the history and meaning of photography, from Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida to Susan Sontag’s On Photography to Jack Kerouac’s introduction to Robert Frank’s The Americans.
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