Jarrod Beck: MORETHANTHEEYECANSEE

MORETHANTHEEYECANSEE fills the West 10th Window with ambiguous shards of broken plaster ranging from heavy masses to diaphanous wisps. Beck created the installation in situ, making and breaking a new mold every day for 10 days. The work is an effort to examine the limits of the small space and the effect those limits have on Becks’ typically expansive sculptural practice. Like much of his work, MORETHANTHEEYECANSEE considers the landscape and our experience of it. At the West 10th Window, he takes the notion of massive scale out of the conversation, rendering the landscape small, intimate, and fragile. The installation is delicate, broken, and shifting and this speaks to our fleeting experience of the shifting environment around us.

MORETHANTHEEYECANSEE is physical: the pushing and shoving gestures of the artist are apparent in the wave-like forms crashing on the windows. However, the semi-abstract text on the glass tempers the outward thrust of the work. The opening lines are, “You and I, we’re standing by the fence, the one that keeps us in and others out. It’s the net that catches the detritus of the city, holds it, holds us, until the harvest.” The text acts much like the fence it mentions, keeping the plaster in and the world out.

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The West 10th Street Window is curated by Natalie Diaz and Jennie Lamensdorf and is sponsored by the Time Equities Inc. (TEI) Art-in-Buildings Program. TEI is committed to enriching the experience of our properties through the Art-in-Buildings Program, an innovative approach that brings contemporary art by emerging and mid-career artists to non-traditional exhibition spaces in the interest of promoting artists, expanding the audience for art, and creating a more interesting environment for our building occupants, residents, and their guests.