A Conversation of a Continuously Arriving Present Moment

Time. It is measured by a clock and calendar. It represents all instants, manifests all moments. It is the thing by which we measure our lives. We both remember past time and hope for future time. Yet we can only be present in present time. The true power of existence is in each moment arriving, each instant renewing, each second of potential activation, intervention, and choice that is embedded in each ‘now’. It is the eternal union between ghosted past and mystic future – the hot and potent seed of human action, volatility, hope, reticence, and delivery.

It is a ‘conversation across a dark ground’.

Ann Beam, Conversation Across a Dark Ground

Ann Beam’s exhibition Continuously Arriving Present Moment alludes to themes of eternalism and inhabits a realm of inherent optimism. Her ruggedly constructed monumentally scaled works with draped, stapled, and falling bark on torn, tattered, painted, decorated, stacked, and smudged cardboard layers are anything but less than extraordinary in their spiritual hopefulness and astonishing in their insubordination to conventional art media. They are seductively constructed paradoxes of nature and man – self and universe – time past and present. Remarkably, the works transfix in the moment of arriving, unchained from their own material incarnations, transcendent of their own proportionality, despondent to their fixed essential properties. As such, you are invited to experience the exhibition in this indeterminate and delirious flux of each arriving new present moment.

In this ‘conversation across a dark ground’, “Imagination is More Important Than Knowledge”, “New Vision Equals New World”, and “Connection is the Reason for Confidence.” This conversation takes place in writing and hand signs around a deep blue arc of the world that scintillates on a dark plane of these poetic words arriving against cardboard interruptions that bear advertising for a battery powered vehicle, recycling, or Made in Canada items. It’s a prolific moment at each encounter in the conversation as a tense and exciting relationship between the elevated universal and the base rudimentary unfolds and harmonizes, contrasts and collaborates.

Ann Beam, Universal/Transversal

 

Mystery Into the Light and Universal Transversal show vigour and movement. Horses running, paint splattering off their painted legs. Hand prints suggesting human traces, a Hershey ChipIt ad appearing to offer some kind of sweet sustenance, and words that read “your gear has arrived.” You feel that indeed perhaps your gear has arrived with all the tantalizing bits you’re offered on inspection. The momentum of the horses running is powerful and you can see that they’re running directly towards our ‘conversation across a dark ground.’ Continually propelling towards it, moving in with their caravans of soul-clad symbolism laid out in patterns in their atmospheric and elusive landscapes.

Anchoring the other side of this conversation is Earth Incorporated. It looms and swirls with sensual typhoons of cast-off matter against a beautiful, painterly world globe. Glad, Harley Davidson, Ritz, McCain, Dare, Canada Dry, Hudson Bay, Tim Horton’s, and Chapmans all appear within the turning, elegant gyrations of paint. They are not necessarily mere malicious remnants of waste however; in fact they are probably more like outposts in the conversation about the present moment. They represent the turning of times, cultural accumulations, visions that created a new world of incorporation – one that will be disenfranchised and created new again. Anchored at the bottom of Earth Incorporated is a wristwatch with its face painted over with white. You can’t tell the time or know when time stopped. In fact time has perhaps been deleted. It’s been removed from our repertoire. We are left at sea in our own existence, running like the horses wildly towards a deeper understanding of the conversation of the present moment.

Conversation in front of Earth Incorporated (Ann Beam)

The image of the horse appears again in Hokusai Watching and most significantly in her iconic work At the Horse Washing Waterfall where long strands of birch bark fall in place of water and curl into swirls and waves at the bottom of which appears an image of the horse being washed by the artist. This is perhaps a symbol of artistic and spiritual renewal as the ever-arriving water falls and flows and they wash themselves in each new moment of its advent.

Gareth Lichty, Patrick Cull, Ann Beam, Aidan Ware in front of At the Horsewashing Waterfall

The waterfall provides a powerful anchor for the exhibition, for thinking about time. The title piece Continuously Arriving Present Moment is a graphic stylization of the waterfall that contains thoughts written out in poetic stanzas.

“Moving

Repleneshing
Blance_ing
What ever

Is
Without Asking

Freely

Given
You
Brought

Your

Self

Here”

Ann Beam, Continuously Arriving Present Moment

 

Next to this is the most recent work completed by Ann Beam titled Time Traveller 2, another monumental work of corrugated boxes. In this piece you experience three different versions of a figure rising out of a mystic white landscape, each at different stages of materialization and arrival. The arrows below each figure point upward and the third, most realized figure, stands over arrows that both point up and point down, alluding to the cycles of time and restitution. The figure is a self-portrait of Ann – a beautiful homage to her own continuous invention of herself as an artist.

It is perhaps then that we realize that we did bring ourselves here. That like Ann, like the horses, like the waterfall, we are constantly in a conversation of a continuously arriving present moment where each encounter is new and new again.

~ Aidan Ware, Director & Curator