Lisa Beck's Complex Geometries at St. Kate

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Photo courtesy of St. Kate—The Arts Hotel

Lisa Beck’s “Send and Receive” open through Nov. 8 at St. Kate—The Arts Hotel

I have had the somewhat unusual experience of viewing Lisa Beck’s current exhibition “Send and Receive” (open through Nov. 8 at St. Kate—The Arts Hotel). I viewed it a number of times, in an indirect manner, before seeing it as a dedicated viewer. Over the course of several visits to the hotel, her show hit me at oblique angles…like flickering visual shoulder taps. Without even acknowledging them consciously, her works threw half-formed impressions at me from afar. What vaguely seemed like a polite show of colorful geometric abstractions were hiding more sweeping truths about the nature of that and other histories.

The particular piece of work that flickered in my mind like a sun-floater was a seven-foot tall, free-standing sculptural painting of concentric blue and pink rectangles. It sits in the center of the intimate gallery space at the St. Kate Hotel with a seemingly static composure. The work is a more complex construction featuring a tightly ordered geometric abstract painting placed against a silver panel at a right angle. This reveals an ordered array of nested rectangles only by reflecting them along a vertical bilateral axis. The mirroring panel completes the composition imperfectly, as the mylar foil plane is irregularly dimpled and therefore not cleanly transposed. As a result, what one sees is a dissolved image begging for closure and resolution. It is elusive even as it is emergent, opening up another separate spatial dimension in the oblique mirrored space.

The walls in the gallery feature a collection of 2-D works plying similar historical and conceptual contradictions. They cannily reference the history of geometric abstraction through the use of tight bands of color, clean angular lines and tight craft. However, they disrupt our expectations of that history by spoiling the urge to read them as concrete hermetic objects. Beck’s omnivorous application of reflective foil and wood texturing subverts what might look like basic formulaic art if seen from a safe distance.

An arrangement of glass spheres on vertical wires crystalizes her position with regard to the other subject matter. The installation is gorgeous despite its more topical ambitions. They resemble drops of dew clinging to a spider web (only by visual coincidence, of course). The spheres function as a prism through which the rest of the show comes into focus. Because they hang in the center of the gallery, one is forced to view the wall-based geometric abstractions through the concave lenses, which turns the pieces into amorphous liquid distortions. Each work is multiplied as you look at it through the glass orbs. Their scale is also diminished, and their numbers multiplied. By distorting and obscuring the more conventionally abstract objects, the installation becomes a statement about abstraction in the most real and applicable sense of that hopelessly slippery term.

Beck’s work at the St. Kate Hotel tugs gently on the paradoxical thread that has insufficiently divided the multiple meanings of the term “abstraction”; the definitions that have lazily shapeshifted between objectivity and non-objectivity for a century. Digging further into either side of this oppositional relationship is less interesting than what Beck does by showing that it is both and neither. She entertains the idea in “Send and Receive” that the membrane between the representational and the imagined, the concrete and the abstract, is a rhetorical construction, and that art and contemporary visual culture at the moment might be best served by thinking of it as a spectrum of possibilities—truth might be multiple, solid, fluid and immaterial at the same time.