HallSpace
950 Dorchester Avenue
Dorchester, Massachusetts
April 18 through May 23
"IT ALL STARTED WITH A JAR OF STUFF AND A VIDEO CAMERA," BEBE BEARD SAID OF THIS MULT-MEDIA VIDEO, DRAWING AND SCULPTURE INSTALLATION, PART OF THE 2009 BOSTON CYBERARTS FESTICAL.
I visited Beard’s studio in industrial South Boston on a snowy Saturday
morning, and she greeted me with a hug, a block of Gruyere, farmer’s market
raspberries and popovers from the district’s beloved Flour bakery. Were Tim
Burton to make a film about the colorful career of a window-dresser turned
video artist starring Helena Bonham Carter, it would be Bebe Beard’s biopic. She produced the jar of stuff that started it all, a tall jar full of iron oxide powder resembling charcoal. “Isn’t it wonderful?” she asked.
For “With or Without You,” Beard coats ball bearings in the iron oxide pigmentand pulls them across sheets of paper using magnets. These experiments inmovement and line are captured in short films made by Beard and set to audioby sound artist Lou Cohen. The 10 videos and 100 accompanying drawings willbe projected and hung on HallSpace’s walls and floor.
“Through the process of capturing the video material, the drawings become
the artifacts of making the video,” said Beard, who’s interested in the physical aspect of the process, and the tension
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