title: Black Lives > Artspeak
artist: Meghan Moe Beitiks
materials: Black wrap, Chalk, Electrical Tape
dimensions: Two windows 31" x 29"
location: Gainesville, FL
Two windows read "Relationally Fundamental Aesthetics" and "Socially Literate Practice" in chalk. As day fades to night, so do these words, replaced by the phrase "Black Lives Matter," in the form of light shaped by black wrap.
Black Lives Matter. Any work that concerns itself with relationships needs to consider its impact on the lives of people of color. International Art English is often centrally concerned with contextualizing itself within or against canons of art: these words are rendered meaningless in a context where white supremacy dictates the terms.
Meghan Moe Beitiks is an artist working with associations and disassociations of culture/nature/structure. She analyzes perceptions of ecology though the lenses of site, history, emotions, and her own body in order to produce work that analyzes relationships with the non-human. She was a Fulbright Student Fellow, a recipient of the Claire Rosen and Samuel Edes Foundation Prize for Emerging Artists, a MacDowell Colony fellow, and an Artist-in-Residence at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. She exhibited her work at the I-Park Environmental Art Biennale, Grace Exhibition Space in Brooklyn, Defibrillator Performance Art Gallery in Chicago, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the House of Artists in Moscow, and other locations in California, Chicago, Australia and the UK. She received her BA in Theater Arts from the University of California, Santa Cruz and her MFA in Performance Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is currently an interdisciplinary Studio Art Lecturer at the University of Florida.
Follow her on Instagram: @culturenaturestructure
More on Meghan Moe Beitiks' practice
I gather multiple forms of understanding—visual, academic, personal, physical, material – together in my work. I attempt to be conscious of my limits, biases and prejudices within the process, while acknowledging the effect that the perceptions of others have on me. I make space for difference. I do this in order to articulate some ways in which all things (yes, literally all things) are conceptually and ecologically connected. Research guides the work’s final form. It ends up being video, performance, installation, writing, whatever the process demands. I strive to combine the various realities I encounter into as comprehensive an understanding or embodiment of a single “thing” as I can muster. These “things” have included Neutrinos, The Weather, Processes of Recovery, Apologies and Forgiveness. The most urgent connections for me to articulate are between the human and the non-human, the emotional and the material, the descriptive and the enacted/embodied. Ultimately I see my work as a series of exchanges of meaning. A reflection on relationships. An acknowledgment both of connection, and the impossibility of true understanding.