Erik Beehn: Are We There Yet
Friday, July 12, 2019 through Saturday, August 31, 2019
North Las Vegas Campus Fine Arts Gallery
The College of Southern Nevada Department of Fine Arts will host an exhibition of painting, photography, printmaking and installation artwork by CSN alum, Erik Beehn. Are We There Yet will open Friday, July 12, 2019 and will run through Saturday, August 31, 2019. Mr. Beehn will participate in an Artist Talk on Wednesday, August 28, 2019, at 6 p.m. in Room H207, locates on the North Las Vegas campus. A Reception will follow in the Fine Arts Gallery, located in Room H101, also on the North Las Vegas campus.
Erik Beehn’s multimedia work investigates an arc of mark making techniques throughout the 20th century and the evolution of observational painting into abstraction. He received his MFA and BFA degrees from the School of The Art Institute of Chicago and is currently an adjunct faculty member at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. Beehn is a cofounder and director of Test Site Projects, a fine art publishing house located in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Speaking of his art, Beehn says, “My work is informed by a transient culture where experience is democratized. Raised in a hotel on the Las Vegas Strip, I witnessed a city constantly working to reinvent itself, absorbing popular culture into its preexisting fabric. My surroundings were that of an urban environment where access transcended location and reproductions offered standardized experiences that catered to collective understandings of beauty and pleasure. Las Vegas is a simulacrum that reflects the contemporary American vernacular; devoid of specificity, it is a cultural melting pot ripened with kitsch sensibilities and saturated with excess. It is this lack of specificity, a byproduct of excess and immediacy, which inspires my current studio practice.”
“Operating in a space between comprehension and discomfort, I investigate familiarity as a framework for introducing new interpretations of preexisting subjects. Beginning with found representation, such as stock photography, I contextualize a vocabulary on the peripheral of contemporary culture within the lineage of art history. I explore generalized understandings of beauty and representation in my work as a response to the loss of specificity fostered by our current jpeg-circulating culture.”
The CSN Fine Arts Gallery is free and open to the public. Gallery hours are from 9 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. Monday through Friday and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday. The Fine Arts Gallery is located at the half circle drive near CSN’s main entrance, on the North Las Vegas campus at 3200 E. Cheyenne Avenue, one-mile East of I-15 North.
For more information, please call: CSN Fine Arts Gallery (702) 651-4146 http://www.csn.edu/artgallery