Glowlab is pleased to announce Phototropic Dormancy, a solo exhibition by up-and-coming New York artist Beka Goedde. Installed as a site-specific environment at Glowlab, Goedde’s mixed-media sculptures, hand-cast plaster and works on wood panel focus the viewer’s ability to read and create passages through a landscape. Her work provides a three-dimensional point of entry into a dense field of vision marked by layers of textured plywood and plaster, etchings, graphite, pigment and earth-toned encaustic wax.

This exhibition of new works is a study of landscape as time, and the ways movement and decay affect our spatial and psychological construction of imagery. The title refers to the latent potential in plants to obtain energy from and grow toward sources of light. Goedde’s research brings her to ruins in the American southwest, as well as the southeast and other locations where natural disaster or change has inscribed new areas of settlement; the use of building materials reflects the poverty of the inhabitants, who build over unstable ground or water. By studying the structures built by the very people living within them, and communities that exist together with available resources under local shelters, Goedde finds re-invented stories of creation, patterns of building and natural occurrences of life. She literally constructs her experience by, as she explains, “building a house around myself.” On a more formal level, her pieces often reference the structure of Chinese scroll painting as presence and void, of the painter’s movement across a landscape and the time passed during a journey between places. In this new installation where changes in daylight, pattern and perspective bring forth new spatial experience, the artist’s work re-inscribes our memory with embodied knowledge of the built environment.

Beka Goedde (b. 1982, Seattle) studies the concept of the landscape as a time-frame and movement as the natural decay of structural material. She received her BA from Columbia University, Barnard College, in 2004, with a concentration in behavioral neuroscience and philosophy. Her thesis work focused on the sense of touch, specifically a non-dualist way of conceiving of the space of one’s body and the space surrounding oneself, on both a phenomenal and neurophysiological level. Goedde’s work has been exhibited in New York at the International Print Center, Cheim & Read, Glowlab and Leo Kesting Gallery. Her work is included in numerous private collections, including the Beth Rudin DeWoody collection.

Glowlab is an innovative art gallery and creative catalyst located in New York, collaborating with and presenting the work of artists exploring the convergence of art, technology and the urban environment.