Kim Beck
Everything Must Go!

Mixed Greens is pleased to announce a timely window installation by Kim Beck. The site-specific piece will involve a cacophony of hand-drawn for sale, for rent, clearance and similarly brazen signs in the ground floor and first floor windows.

In 2008, Beck witnessed the beginning of the economic downturn when signs advertising vacancies began appearing on houses and storefront windows. Placards meant to announce a sale, liquidation or foreclosure have since become commonplace and easily ignored—ubiquitous in our current landscape.

For years, Beck has used images of architecture and landscape to make artworks that survey peripheral and suburban spaces, ignoring classical and picturesque elements to concentrate on the banal scenery one navigates in everyday life. Her work urges a reconsideration of the built environment—the peculiar street signs, gas station banners, overgrown weeded lots and self-storage buildings—bringing the ordinary and routine into focus.

In Everything Must Go!, the result is a jarring reality-check that puts Mixed Greens and all of Chelsea up for sale. Her drawings are stacked and competing for space in an installation that mimics the surrounding urban landscape and a general feeling of unease. The work provides a thoughtful consideration of our current economic, artistic, political and visual landscapes. As Heather Pesanti writes in a recent essay: “Beck’s gentle and delicately meticulous use of materials imbues her work with an elegantly beautiful artistic aesthetic that belies its disenchanted beginnings.”

Kim Beck grew up in Colorado and currently lives and works in Pittsburgh and New York. She has exhibited at the Walker Art Center, the Carnegie Museum of Art, Smack Mellon, Socrates Sculpture Park and Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center among other prestigious venues. She recently completed the Space Program at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation and she’s held other residencies at Yaddo, International Studio & Curatorial Program, Cité Internationale des Arts, Vermont Studio Center and VCCA. She has received awards and fellowships from ARS Electronica, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Thomas J. Watson Foundation and the Heinz Foundation. Her artist’s book, A Field Guide to Weeds, published through the Printed Matter Emerging Artist Publishing Program, is in its second edition. She received her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and BA from Brandeis University. She is currently developing a site-specific installation for the High Line that will debut later this year.

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