Gina Beavers
b. 1974, United States
Gina Beavers’ paintings resist this careless, conservative dismantling of modernist, avant-garde and later strategies in painting through a very simple strategy – they depict something that is flat, that is Instagram posts, in a way that is insistently not flat. The paintings are three dimensional reliefs, with contours, edges and bits which stick out from the canvas. Her works insist on physicality, on the actual encounter between a viewer and an object on a wall, not the representation of that encounter. Her subject matter tends to be drawn from popular genres of Instagram – ‘food porn’ for example. Yet she renders these generic Instagram images, sometimes with their generic layouts from popular Instagram-related apps, in a way that works against their previous status as generic Instagram images because their three-dimensionality means something very simple: they are almost impossible to conventionally Instagram in an accurate way.
At the heart of modernist painting was resistance. This sometimes took the form of a resistance to a literal reading of the painting, or a resistance in terms of an avoidance or negation of subject matter. There was a resistance to straightforward consumption. The high moment of abstraction, Malevich’s black square, does not look like a perfect black square. It looks like a cracked, painted black square. These are works that insist on their status as paintings first and foremost and this entails the act of looking, of standing in front of these objects in order to see what affect they have on you. There is resistance when there is nothing easy to hang onto, or to interpret, noting that is a straightforward representation. But now that unthinking representation has emerged again in the screens of our devices, how then to resist? Instagram this, Beavers’ paintings seem to say, and after all, why wouldn’t you? These are the very images that have been popular with Instagrammers – food porn, make-up tips, body art. But there’s a twist. With their insistence on their three-dimensionality and their insistence on the moment of encounter, the paintings are saying something slightly different: Instagram this, and fail.