Lindsey Beal: PROGRESSIONS
Exhibition Dates: January 4 – 27, 2019
Opening Reception: Friday, January 4th, 5:30 to 8:30pm
Artist Talk & Closing Reception: Sunday, January 27th, 4pm to 6pm (Details here)
Technology has affected women’s bodies throughout history. Women use it for their health, sexual pleasure, to alter their appearance, provide for themselves or others, for safety, and numerous other day-to-day functions. Conversely, it is used on their bodies in medicine and fashion, to aid or control, to reward and to punish. Both in the past and present, technology can aid or harm women’s bodies. Inspired by the ways in which contemporary American society views women, I investigate how women lived in the past, drawing parallels and contrasts between women’s lives then and now.
Progressions incorporates six bodies of work. Transmission uses the cyanotype process to catalogue and replicate bacterial stains of STDs which requires technology to detect. Reproduction(s) uses high-resolution scans of contraceptives to create wallpaper patterns, informing the viewer of STD and pregnancy prevention. Intimate Appliances presents ziatype-printed antique vibrators housed in union cases, a box used to house a loved one’s portrait. Parturition catalogues historical obstetric and gynecological tools by replicating glass educational slides and Lumiere’s Autochromes. Foundations depicts corsetry used to shape a woman’s silhouette in the age of the daguerreotype. Finally, The Venus Series uses the wet-plate collodion process and handmade paper sculptures to create contemporary versions of the Prehistoric era’s stone Venus figurines.
About the Artist:
Lindsey Beal is a photo-based artist in Providence, Rhode Island where she teaches at Rhode Island School of Design, Massachusetts College of Art & Design and New Hampshire Institute of Art’s MFA program. She has a M.F.A. in Photography from the University of Iowa and a Graduate Certificate in Book Arts at the University of Iowa’s Center for the Book.
As a photo-based artist, she combines research about historical and contemporary women’s lives with historical photographic processes; often including sculpture, paper-making, and artist books in her work. Inspired by the ways in which contemporary American society views women, she investigates how women lived in the past, drawing parallels and contrasts between women’s lives then and now. Both through presentation and subject matter, she connects the viewer to the past and how it reflects today’s political and social culture. She connects her imagery to photographic history, how it was practiced, developed and presented by early photographers.
Lindsey was featured on New York Times Lens Blog, Slate France, BBC Mundo, PDN, New Scientist, Lenscratch, Don’t Take Pictures, LensCulture, Light Leaked, and published in various textbooks and periodicals. She has shown at national museums, galleries & universities, including solo shows at the Griffin Museum of Photography, the Danforth Art Museum, and the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. She was a Finalist for Photolucida’s Critical Mass Top 200 in 2016 and 2018.