The mania for possession is possible without money, but greed itself is the product of a definitive social development….not natural [naturlich] as opposed to historical [Geschlichen]… Karl Marx, Grundrisse, pp.133-4.

Here Is Elsewhere Gallery at the Front is delighted to present “Future Possessive”, Beech’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. The title of the show speaks to a twisted scene of a techno-naturalist grammatological imaginary where machines of knowledge, a result of scientific, artistic, and mythological explorations, are enmeshed in, and routinized by capitalism. The exhibition features a new series of prints, drawings, and paintings on paper that begin from an interpretation of Ramon Llull’s Ars Magna, a holistic computational system developed in the 12th Century by the monk from Palma, Majorca, aiming to manifest the randomness of the cosmos. Llull’s Ars Magna was a serious game to play the infinite in the bounds of finitude. Significantly, these machines established the premise for computational algorithms today; systems that invisibly organize what seems to be natural and become persistent forces across time.

In Beech’s picturing of these systems, more elements grow and spill from them. Forms of surplus, various perversions, extensions, and uprootings, result in new pictures that have their own combinatory diagrammatics. “In this process, explains the artist, the works embed and propose answers to the existential question: how do we mediate the complexity of a world that we see ourselves to be in, and exist as a part of, without replicating the capitalist dreams of possession? If this form of possession must be abolished, then what are the principles of our satisfaction, unity, and possession in and after this act? What aesthetic forms, languages, and geometries mediate this passage to another world?”

The works in “Future Possessive” layer and build color, density, and matter. They create dialectical episodes that intersect and overlap in each piece. These assemblages of natural/everyday language algorithmic systems play out stories of the unknown. They depict plants that occupy the liminal space between the desert and the forest of the San Bernardino Mountains; and elsewhere the ruins of factories in Armenia, dams, and Ferris wheels from the Soviet era, left to slowly decay – “the end of political and industrial eras and new formulations of power”, as Beech puts it. These scenes of the end and the beginning of natural, capitalist, and communist systems are permeated by the consistent force of computation… and cracks in time.

The exhibition itself is proposed as a heterogeneous machine, a computational device that becomes the work of another enterprise that reiterates but also negates the ‘first machine’. It infers another future – perhaps one that we determine but does not possess at all. These works explore not only the degradation and wreckage of capital but also propose what is inaugurated in this negation; what languages move us from dominance to revolution to other futures? nguages move us from dominance to revolution to other futures?

Details: