Beth Krebs
Façade

Mixed Greens is thrilled to present a site-specific window installation by Beth Krebs. Windows are valuable commodities in New York real estate and gallery windows offer enticing visual access to exhibitions and artworks inside. Krebs humorously challenges our expectations by offering viewers a brick wall.

Much of Krebs’ work creates architectural interventions that disrupt the viewer’s assumptions of space. In the woods of McDowell Colony, for instance, she drew a continuous horizon line on the tree trunks in a forest and installed a drop ceiling in a grove of trees. These were poetic gestures carving out an interior—and the illusion of intimacy—in the vast open air. In exhibitions indoors, she created unexpected openings and escape routes. In one such project, panels were removed from the ceiling of a bland, office-like room to reveal a fabricated sky above. In all situations, her art presents unexpected possibilities, or, as she puts it, “makeshift magic from limited means.”

In the Mixed Greens windows, Krebs responds to the existing architecture by installing drawings of bricks and bricked-over windows printed on Duratrans. From down the block, Krebs’ drawings present a fairly convincing depiction of sealed windows familiar to most urban dwellers. Upon closer inspection, however, the marks of the drawing and the transparency of the material become evident. A viewer on the street is denied a view into the gallery and is, instead, presented with layers of façade. Hovering between the real and the imagined, Façade invites viewers to consider drawing, truth, and access.

Beth Krebs grew up in Connecticut, lived for nearly a decade in New Orleans, and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. She has exhibited her installations in galleries and alternative spaces in and around Manhattan, including the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), the Bronx Museum of Art, The Jersey City Museum of Art, Smack Mellon Gallery, the Cue Foundation, Real Artways, and the Elizabeth Foundation Project Space. She is the recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant and the Paul Robeson Emerging Artist Award from Rutgers University. She was chosen as a finalist in the Artist in the Marketplace (AIM) and Aljira Emerge programs, and has been a fellow at the Bemis Center (2005), Sculpture Space (2006), MacDowell Colony (2008), Jentel (2010), and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts (2011). She received her BA from the College of William and Mary in Virginia, and an MFA from Rutgers University in New Jersey.

For more information, please visit bethkrebs.com.


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