Hamilton Gallery exhibit to feature works by digital artist Amy Beecher

The Dorrance H. Hamilton Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of artist Amy Beecher’s solo show entitled “Lifestyle Pictures.” An opening reception with short artist talk is scheduled for the artist on Thursday, Jan. 26, at 5 p.m. The art exhibit itself will display from Friday, Jan. 27 through Thursday, Feb. 16.

“Lifestyle Pictures” represents the newest collection of artist Amy Beecher’s digital paintings and photographs. “Lifestyle Pictures” is at its heart both a meditation on digital painting and documentation of a marriage, a domestic life, a space curated and repackaged. Beecher pushes observers of her art to examine the poetics of the banal through the lens of a digital painter alongside her daily home life and routine.

The humor of the work comes in its willingness to thumb its nose at serious painting in favor of a kind of deliberately faulty facture, hiding the sure hand of a painter schooled in the misadventures of modernism behind the digital glitch of a system she designs.

What is formal picture making here and what is emotional? What is produced by Beecher herself, and what emerges from larger systems? Beecher asks questions of the formal space of the gallery as well as the studio, making it all her personal vision board, but with a slant.

Images, taken from Amy Beecher’s website, show examples of her digital art.

Beecher composes from an archive of found and original photographic and painterly assets and feeds them into a script to create an endless array of complex and chance compositions. Included in this archive are staged photographs, produced on a set decorated to evoke a generic and gentrified domestic imaginary: yoga blocks, begonia plants, beige couches, and Beecher and her young child. The archive also includes an array of domestic detritus from her own home — including toddler boogers and the odd household dust bunny.

The resulting compositions evoke equally the aspirational vision boards ubiquitous on social media, early modernist geometric abstraction.

Beecher herself has discussed her work as a kind of “wine mom glitch abstraction.” Leaves and vistas are flattened by Mondrian-inspired grids. Enormous chicks emerge from behind gigantic exercise bands. In photographs, Beecher images herself working on digital collages, sometimes alone, sometimes with her son, eschewing The Studio for a kitchen table or a living room floor.

Amy Beecher’s artwork comprises digital imaging, text and performance. Her solo exhibitions and performances have been hosted by Hesse Flatow, The International Center for Photography in New York City; GRIN and Providence College-Galleries in Providence, Rhode Island; and Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, New York, among other venues. Her work has been reviewed by Art In America, Big Red Shiny, and Title Magazine. She has been awarded residencies and fellowships by New Art Center, The Macdowell Colony, Shandaken Projects and The Vermont Studio Center.

Beecher lives and works between Brattleboro, Vermont, and New York, New York, and is assistant professor of visual art and media studies at Emerson College. Her podcast, a growing archive of dialogues with other artists from 2013 onward, is The Amy Beecher Show.

The Dorrance H. Hamilton Gallery is located in the Antone Academic Center on the campus of Salve Regina. It is handicap accessible with parking along Lawrence Avenue and Leroy Avenue. Its exhibits are open to the public Tuesdays and Thursdays from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Wednesdays and Fridays from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; and Saturdays and Sundays from Noon to 4 p.m. The gallery is closed on Mondays.