Thomas Beale

Artist Statement

I am interested in what may occur at the meeting point of the natural and the intuitive- how the process of art-making can transform the common, physical stuff of the natural world into something which resonates with one’s subjective, interior state, and thus, in a circular way, bring a refocused consciousness to the physical world at hand. I work with found, natural materials- wood, shells, moss. The end-products of lives, these materials possess their own sensorial properties. I am interested in using these qualities, intensifying them, so that a viewer’s final experience of the work is one in which there is no element of artifice- all the information is on the surface- and yet, the familiar has suddenly become strange and new.

Thomas Beale Untitled (Ascension) Found wood, ladder 2021 16 x 15 x 16 inches

Bio

Thomas Beale is a New York-based artist who works primarily with found, natural materials. He has shown his work internationally, with sculptures in the collections including the Museum of Old and New Art (Tasmania, AU), the Hood Museum (NH, USA), and The Bunker Artspace (FL, USA). He has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors including a National Endowment for the Arts U.S-Japan Creative Artist Fellowship, grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Kaplan Foundation, and others. In addition to his work in sculpture, he founded and directed Honey Space, an exhibition space active in Chelsea from 2008-2012, which the New York Times called “one of the city’s strangest art establishments.” Thomas is a graduate of Dartmouth College. He currently resides and works in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn.

tbeale.com

Xingze Li

Artist Statement

Each wall has its history, time, light, and dust. Since 2016 I have lived in Brooklyn, far away from hometown, walls offer me a space of reverie and relief. I envision the ambiguity and richness of the surface after looking at walls for hours. The relationship between walls and lighting creates the environments in which we inhabit, shaping our emotional well-being. My work offers my reflection on walls and their emotional undertones. It turns what I see and experience in the moment into poetic forms. I begin by photographing indoor space and then transfer the image onto a sculptural surface. Through my process, the image becomes a flat object with the sense of dimension, depth, and perspective of how it was being observed in the actual place. The various textures I employ create a new sensory surface, blurring the sense of touch, proximity, and the experience of light and warmth.

Studio view Medium: Dye sublimation on aluminum, glue 2022 Size various

Xingze Li (Yan’an, China) is a multidisciplinary visual artist based in Brooklyn. He has exhibited and curated in China, America, and Denmark. Solo and two-person exhibitions have been exhibited at places such as Sweet Lorraine Gallery, Tutu Gallery, and Hunter East Harlem Gallery. He had participated in group exhibitions at the Cathouse Proper and Pratt Manhattan Gallery in New York City, Little Berlin in Philadelphia, and Carlsberg Byens Galleri & Kunstsalon in Copenhagen. Li earned his bachelor's degree in 2015 from Xi’an Academy of Fine Arts and received his MFA in Painting and Drawing from Pratt Institute in 2019.

www.xingzeli.com