Kim Beck

Gallery Affiliations: Mixed Greens Gallery, Pentimenti Gallery

Region: Northeast

Are these the willful remnants of an arcadian past? Evidence of nature's struggle against a growing asphalt sea? Or a developer's attempt to prevent a driver's dizzying fear of wide-open spaces? The islands of trees growing in parking lots accumulate, in my new body of work, into discreetly parceled urban forests. Sometimes they appear isolated in solitary moments of focus–the cracks in their cement barriers, the awkwardness of untrimmed growth revealing a hidden pressure on expectations. It should look more exacting, more perfect, cleaner, and neater–but it doesn't. In the abstracted, accumulated, silhouetted images of architecture, weeds, billboards, ugly distractions are transformed into objects of desire, or at the very least, consideration. By drawing attention to these peripheral moments, my work brings the banal and everyday into focus, renders the overlooked, stepped on, and unseen parts of our world–visible.