Ericka Beckman: Double Reverse
MIT List Visual Arts Center
Since the mid-1970s, Ericka Beckman (b. 1951, United States; lives and works in New York and Boston)
has forged a signature visual language in film, video, installation, and photography. Often shot against black, spatially ambiguous backdrops, her moving-image works are structured according to the logic of child’s play, games, folklore, or fairy tales, and populated by archetypical characters and toy-like props in bright, primary colors. Throughout her work, Beckman engages profound questions of gender, role-playing, competition, power, and control.
The exhibition presents four moving-image installations made over thirty-five years, providing the first opportunity for US audiences to survey her work. In You the Better (1983), a group of uniformed players engage in a series of enigmatic ball games, futilely betting and competing against a house that always wins. Cinderella (1986) presents a feminist restaging of the titular fairy tale alongside a parallel commentary on the legacy of industrial manufacturing. Shot on location, rather than in a black-box studio, Beckman’s more recent works integrate the spatial politics of industrial and other purpose-built architectures. Switch Center (2003) is a kind of post-Soviet, post-industrial ballet filmed in a defunct water treatment plant outside Budapest. In Tension Building (2016), Beckman relates the recurring design elements of stadium architecture to the pageantry surrounding sporting events and to political ideologies that support competition as spectacle. The selected works underscore Beckman’s ongoing interest in the connections between games and gambling, conditions of labor, and larger economic structures.
Ericka Beckman: Double Reverse is organized by Henriette Huldisch, Director of Exhibitions and Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center.
Exhibitions at the List Center are made possible with the support of Fotene Demoulas & Tom Coté, Audrey & James Foster, Idee German-Schoenheimer, Joyce Linde, Jane & Neil Pappalardo, Cynthia & John Reed, and Terry & Rick Stone. In-kind media sponsorship provided by 90.9 WBUR.
General operating support is provided by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the Council for the Arts at MIT; Philip S. Khoury, Associate Provost at MIT; the MIT School of Architecture + Planning; the Mass Cultural Council; and many generous individual donors. The Advisory Committee Members of the List Visual Arts Center are gratefully acknowledged.
CATALOG
EXHIBITION PHOTOS
Photography by Peter Harris Studios