"Walead Beshty's work explores not only the history of photography, but also the way in which photography shapes our understanding of history. He makes this enduring relationship visible by bringing together images of ambiguous places, altering them, and exhibiting them as documentation. Beshty invites the viewer into a surrogate of a place that, though real, by legal definition does not exist. This tenuous link between what is authentic and what is reproduced parallels the medium of photography itself, which captures moments in time that our eyes are trained to believe truly occurred. Beshty's work offers us a chance to experience the sense of uncertainty that this place engenders, lying unsteadily on a line between past and present, fact and fiction, day and night.
Walead Beshty was born in London in 1976 and currently lives in Los Angeles. He received his MFA in 2002 from the Yale University School of Art and his BA from Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, in 1999. He is on the faculty of the Department of Art at CalArts, Valencia, and has served as a visiting lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles and Irvine. Beshty has had solo exhibitions at P.S. 1/MoMA Contemporary Art Center and Wallspace in New York and at China Art Objects Galleries in Los Angeles. His work was also included in group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; the Whitney Museum of American Art and White Columns in New York; and the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, Massachusetts."
-The Hammer Museum, http://hammer.ucla.edu/exhibitions/detail/exhibition_id/84
For more information:
http://www.frieze.com/shows/review/walead_beshty/
http://www.art-agenda.com/reviews/walead-beshty%E2%80%99s-processcolorfield-at-regen-projects-ii-los-angeles/
