Like Richard Dreyfuss’ character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Drew Beckmeyer is obsessed with a topographic shape that he can’t stop re-creating. Nearly every piece in Beckmeyer’s portfolio is haunted by a mysterious pyramid, smiling invisibly as we ponder its impenatrability. We see the shape everywhere: radio towers, volcanoes, pointy hats and multi-tiered wedding cakes all seem to be expressing the same imperceptible concept.
Superficially, Beckmeyer’s elusive trilaterals are enticing, but there’s a thematic refrain at work in his illustrations that interests me more: reckless labyrinthine systems of automated (and often aquatic) transportation. Beckmeyer’s world is scattered and fragmented, but connected by sinister pathways. These irrepressible corridors take the form of roads that may send your car into a nearby pond, water slides that twist in every direction before sending you to your doom, and train tracks headed straight for mystery mountain, with no ticket home.
It’s possible that this fixation with ungovernable conduits comes from Beckmeyer’s lifelong residence in Los Angeles, where anyone who’s sat through traffic on the I-10 can instantly identify with the inevitability and despair of these contemptible tubes. But the artist’s systems of connectivity are also like twisted, disillusioned takes on childhood drawings– pre-adolescent urban planning gone horribly awry. I used to draw maps of idealized cities, with just one road that I could take straight from my house to the to toy store and then to my best friend’s house and Baskin Robbins. Beckmeyer takes that kind of indulgent utopian optimism and turns it upside down, designing a world of chutes and ladders where everything just leads to a snake pit. And it’s kinda awesome.
Drew Beckmeyer’s show at JUNC in Silver Lake just ended last week, but he has two shows coming up in 2008 at Space 1026 in Philadelphia and the Tinlark Gallery in Hollywood.
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“contemptible tubes” made me so happy