Title

Iota

Artist

Rachel Beamer

Preview

Medium

archival inkjet print

Artist's Statement

All that life contains is a series of photographs printed on archival inkjet paper. The photographs in this project were captured on daily visits from a vantage point serving a stretch of shoreline along the southern part of Lake Erie. As in still life, the images are meditations on the constant and subtle changes states of states of light and matter. Drawn back by the environment’s transformative qualities, the dramatic shifts in form, color, light and movement from one day to the next are perceptible in the images.

In Iota, the spray of a wave intersects with the pink end of day light, resembling the wayward sparks that occur from welding steel. Mercury reveals the lake as it takes on the visual properties of its title, shifting into a viscous metal pool. In Riddle, the swimming pool-aqua water is engulfed in an atmospheric haze giving it the feel of a cinematic environment. Taken over the course of four months (January-April, 2016), the environment’s elements are distilled to their sculptural and spatial dynamics. The images translate the perceptible shifts in states and temperature that are unique to this interval of time.

Artist Biography

Rachel Beamer completed her MFA in Photographic and Electronic Media from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2012. In her photographic images, Rachel Beamer explores how memory is embedded in surface and space. The fleeting qualities of subjects suggest traces of movement throughout dimensions. The images balance at transitions between interior and exterior thresholds and changes from one state of matter to another, asking where one space ends and another begins. Recent exhibitions include Syncope at Heights Arts, The Peer Show at the Cleveland Print Room and the Ohio Online Visual Artist Registry Art Show at the Carnegie Gallery (Columbus, Ohio). Beamer has received four artist grants from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities (DCCAH), and has been featured in Art Beat on NPR Morning Edition for the exhibition Instantaneous: Re-mixing old school instant photography in a digital era.