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Beast On Its Back | on a Malibu Hillside
Image credit: Decker Canyon, Malibu, California, USA | John Garcia
Exhibition
Beast On Its Back
Beast On Its Back is a group exhibition in Decker Canyon, Malibu, USA, featuring new work by Jesse Stecklow, Irina Jasnowski Pascual, Tyler Berrier, Jonny Negron, Nina Hartmann, Sessa Englund, Natasha Romano, Fear Safe, John Garcia, James Jensen and a video from 1978 by George Kuchar. The exhibition is part of Anna Frost’s curatorial fellowship at SEA Foundation in Tilburg, Netherlands exploring multi-purpose space. Her curatorial practice focuses on exhibition-making beyond the white cube and institutional space.
The exhibition is situated in a Californian sheep enclose that was vacated when the 2018 Woolsey Fires impacted major parts of the property. The now empty and overgrown space has you guessing what used to live here. A tall barbed-wire fence put in place to keep the coyotes out now looks more like a device to keep something trapped in the cage-like structure and the wrecked animal feeder has found a new home in the wilted grass. In Beast On It Back, this setting becomes a starting point to explore themes around what we chose to shelter and what we think we need shelter from.
Before Lockdown
Beast On Its Back is a continuation of Anna Frost’s curatorial practice that operates outside the conventional spaces. It ran from February 23 and ended 8 March 2020, just before the pandemic caused the world to shelter in place, effectively making it the last exhibition for the artists included for the foreseeable future.
The SEA Foundation Netherlands Edition spotlights the 10 artistic practices included in the show along with notes on the future landscape of art exhibitions. In many ways, Beast On Its Back can be viewed as a precursor to the post white cube, post institutional, non-urban-centric exhibition projects that our (post) quarantine art world surely will see a blossoming of. During the run of the online presentation, we will dive into these themes by unfolding the exhibition and the artists included in it.
Read more on Anna Frost – curator in residence
also Interview with Anna Frost
Website Anna Frost
