Steven Beckly: A tender touch can bend the straightest of things
Steven Beckly: A tender touch can bend the straightest of things
Jan 7 – Feb 15, 2017
A tender touch can bend the straightest of things cleaves images and objects, photographs and sculptures. Each work expresses an intimacy from touch in both content and form, interrelating the visual and the haptic. His pictures of colour, light, and skin are printed on a variety of surfaces—opaque and translucent, hard and soft. Forming a typology of textures and producing a range in perception, they delicately bend and fold against the apertures of the gallery space. Arousing sense and sensation, they affirm paper as a tactile and three-dimensional space of exposure. By transforming flatness into volume, the installation overturns the traditional conception of a rectilinear photographic frame. As viewers navigate the installation, they encounter a space disrupted by the touch of another presence, pointing to an intimacy between the physical and the spiritual, the natural and the spectral.
You can read Mireille Eagan’s essay response to this show here
Steven Beckly’s images fluidly take the forms of photographs, books, and sculptures. Cultivating a poetics of desire, he explores the epistemology of intimacy and its value in our increasingly interconnected lives. Recent and upcoming exhibitions include solo projects at Daniel Faria Gallery, Art Metropole, Bunker 2 (all Toronto), AKA artist-run (Saskatoon), VU (Québec), and Eastern Edge (St. John’s). He received his MFA from the University of Guelph in 2016. He lives and works in Toronto.
The artist gratefully acknowledges the support of the Toronto Arts Council and the Ontario Arts Council.
