- Who: Beck + Col, Bessie Kunath
- When: October 7 – 21, 2017 (opening reception October 7)
- Where: Ice House building, Long Beach, CA
- What: multisensory arts festival
- Contact: NewTown • info@newtownarts.org
NewTown journeys down to Long Beach to curate 3 Below on October 7-21, 2017 as part of the multisensory arts festival Pump, produced by Flood. The show will feature works by over 50 emerging and mid-career artists from throughout Southern California. Come check it out for works you might not just see, but hear, feel, smell and taste as well. 3 Below will take place in the extravagantly awesome Ice House building, with a site-specific multimedia project that will mark time between the Ice House’s industrial history and its incarnation as a significant Long Beach cultural space. NewTown will present sculptures by Los Angeles based artist Bessie Kunath, and co-present with Flood a performance/installation by Southern California team Beck + Col. To kick off Opening Night (October 7th), visitors to 3 Below will become creators themselves with NewTown’s interactive audio installation in the ghostly basement space. NewTown gives a voice to the imagined history of this mysterious industrial architecture So come on down.
Official Pump 2017 Press Release (pdf) | Pump website
Beck + Col, Frost Bite! Frost Bite!
Live performance, projections, costumes.
Frost Bite! Frost Bite! is a performance and site-specific installation. Multiple projections on pillars act as tombstones or totems to devoured monsters. There will be a 15-minute performance opening weekend with two monsters, and the projections and aftermath will be displayed for the remaining 3 weeks. Two monsters from a formally arid environment deal with the aftermath of a rapid shift in planetary temperature. A lack of resources has forced the now ice monsters to resort to cannibalism. As they devour whatever creatures are left, the monsters are haunted by their previous victims.
Bessie Kunath
A site-specific sculptural installation
About the Artists:
Beck + Col
Los Angeles based artists Beck and Col use humor and chaos to examine the crisis of human exceptionalism. Through costume based performance and video, their work explores alternate universes populated with monsters who obsess over humanity and emulate its dominant attributes. Within these universes, Beck and Col analyze humanity’s construction of sexualized, racialized and naturalized others. By removing human attributes, they shift focus from hyperindividualism to a postanthropocentric perspective, rejecting the view of humanity as the basic unit of reference for knowing the subject 1 . The monsters are at once silly, playful and exceptionally brutal. Through comical yet violent antics, their monsters are both mimicking human behaviors and challenging them. Resisting binary and hierarchical classifications, the monsters expose and force a rethinking of power structures through absurd analysis.
Bessie Kunath
Bessie Kunath received her MFA from UC Santa Barbara in 2012. Previous exhibitions include “Baker’s Dozen” at the Torrance Art Museum, “Touch Move” at the Royal Nonesuch Gallery curated by Lisa Rybovich Cralle, “Safety Dance” at Eastside International; “I Know Everything” curated by Iris Hu at Dave Gallery; “Free Normcore” at Autonomie Projects; “Demolition Woman” curated by Young Chung at Chapman University; “Odd Ghosts and Unlikely Dancers” curated by Michelle Carla Handel at Weekend Gallery . She is also a member of Manual History Machines, a group that organized exhibitions “Are Friends Electric?” at Fellows of Contemporary Art and Claremont University, “Familiar Unfamiliar” and “Time, Time Form”. Bessie lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.
