While much of my past work meticulously replicated specific
plant and animal forms, After Life intentionally utilizes simplified
and even abstracted forms derived from the natural world. Thus
the title After Life is less a statement on the artistic practice
of 'modeling from life' and more a wry comment--from the artist's
point of view--on the notion of producing a new body of work
under the critical lens. Equally important, however, is After
Life's reference to death and spirituality, a common theme in
all of my work.
Independently conceived but conceptually related, the five pieces
in After Life share common themes of ornamentation, entrapment,
and transformation. While some reference predatory and parasitic
processes, others allude to birth and re-birth. Intended to
be seen as both individual pieces and parts of an integral whole,
the pieces simultaneously contrast and complement one another.
Occasionally humorous, often quite serious, and sometimes both
funny and poignant at once, the pieces in After Life utilize
craft materials alongside traditional sculptural processes.
Since childhood, Atlanta artist Karen Rich Beall has maintained
an acute interest in the forces of life and death which exist
in nature, identifying and replicating the visual characteristics
of plants and animals through a scientific approach to classification.
Filling her studio with jars of found specimens, dried and stacked
piles of leaves and bark, even preserving dead birds in her
kitchen freezer, Beall draws inspiration from both the natural
world and the science lab. Paradoxically, her work emerges from
this cluttered environment clean and minimally stated, laboriously
exacting detail given way to the cool aesthetics of contemporary
art.
Much of Beall's past work has dealt with natural processes in
relation to cultural practice. She embedded various antique
furniture pieces, for instance, with carved plaster reliefs
of diseased internal organs as a smart pun on the idea of living
with illness. This wry sense of humor has at times been more
apparent. A line of cast candy carrots, for example, hangs suspended
from gold thread and glass rods, just out of reach from the
viewer.
More recent work has focused on observation. Beall's series
of carnivorous tropical plants made out of sculpted and painted
papier-mache have been particularly viable, providing complex
physical and psychological connotations derived and accentuated
from the actual plants, which Beall grows in small terrariums.
Underpinnings is the title of Beall's latest body
of work, a group of sculptures that, although visually different
from each other, share a common structure: the surface and that
which exists below it. A wall-hung vine made out of wire references
a family tree while evoking a large root. Cast-silicone jellyfish
float in mid-air, their poisonous tentacles dangling from a
single gelatinous body. A group of papier-mache Robins stands
gathered on a patch of lawn, caught in the midst of some unknown
ritual. Small cast-plaster fungi protrude from the wall, recontextualized
from the forest to the gallery. Beall's naturalistic treatment
of these objects provides several layers of interpretation,
nature versus artifice and the inherent beauty of the natural
world being the most immediately recognizable. But as her show
title suggests, there is more to Beall's work than meets the
eye. As accurately as they are rendered, Beall's works almost
always belie realism in favor of the symbolic and the surrogate.