Kevin Beasley
"Navigating the troposphere" reads the biography line on Kevin Beasley's Instagram profile (at least as recently as 24 April, 2024).
Facts about the troposphere?
Beneath the troposphere stands the surface of the earth – the tropopause lives between it and the stratosphere.
It is the site of all weather on Earth.
Unevenly heated by the sun, the troposphere's convection currents translate into large winds that pattern the globe, moving around heat and moisture.
The troposphere contains 75 percent of the atmosphere's mass and 99 percent of the atmosphere's water vapour.
Beasley's cryptic one-line autobiography offers insight into the work of the artist, where studies of land, socio-geography, and 'atmosphere' become slabs of poetry.
b.1985, Lynchburg
Kevin Beasley is preoccupied, above all, with provenance, with the inheritance of found objects, scenes and sounds. Caught between the legible and the obscure, his work blurs the divide between objecthood and personhood, gestures always to the trace of the body, and asks what cultural fragments might suggest about lives and living. His conceptual and material fulcrum is cotton, the history of cotton and everything it has come to represent in black American culture as a symbol of labour and oppression. “Cotton, it takes me everywhere,” Beasley says. “Politics, social relationships you have, you think about economics…reparations. It all just unfolds.” That his home state of Virginia was built on cotton and slave labour, and that the plant continues to grow on his family farm, invites a fraught familiarity into his work. Working with the social fabric of clothing, Beasley explores not only the past but aspirations for the future as reflected in society’s objects.
Beasley was artist in residence at A4 Arts Foundation in January 2020. During his time at the foundation, he transformed the Gallery into a studio and produced an exhibition on-site, without a clear discernible image (February 6–April 30, 2020).