ART CITIES:N.York-Gina Beavers

In her paintings, Gina Beaves transforms digital images appropriated from social media and the Internet into thickly layered compositions that border on sculpture. Across a recurring repertoire of subject matter, from photos hashtagged #FoodPorn to step-by-step cosmetics tutorials, Beavers’s work offers uncanny and often unsettling visions of our digitally mediated lives.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: MoMA Archive

With 40 paintings made over the last decade, Gina Beavers presents her first solo Museum exhibition, entitled “The Life I Deserve”  at MoMA PS1. Built up through dense accumulations of acrylic medium or foam and imbued with almost cinematic color, Gina Beavers’s works are at once repulsive and alluring, highlighting the gap between our digital and physical lives and how we consume, desire, and fashion ourselves to reflect contemporary culture. Deriving their titles from the captions or comments that originally accompanied her source imagery, Beavers actively anticipates that her works will be posted, shared, and re-shared across online platforms. Although composed from social media streams and destined to be reabsorbed by them, the stubborn materiality of Beavers’s paintings resists the logic of digital reproduction. The exhibition opens with a selection of “food porn” paintings, from slabs of raw meat to a rainbow-colored soft serve cone, which allude both directly and indirectly to the body, pointing both to literal and virtual modes of consumption and desire. A small central gallery grapples with consumer culture in a different way: each of the works exhibit the artist’s interest in the history of painting as filtered through mashups of art and kitsch: fingernails painted with reproductions of art-historical masterworks like the “Mona Lisa” and Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” rendered in bacon. The exhibition concludes with a gallery focused on Beavers’s representation of the human body, pointing to the often troubling politics of selfhood in the emotional and social spaces of the Internet. Beavers paints the world as she sees it and crucially she sees it through her phone. More than serving as documentation of the various corners of aesthetic experience on the web and a comment on the ephemeral nature of social media, Beavers’ work is a reflection on the medium itself.

Info: MoMA PS1 is located at 22-25 Jackson Avenue Long Island City, Duration: 31/3-2/9/19, Days & Hours: Thu-Mon 12:00-18:00, www.moma.org