Kevin Beasley: What delineates the edge

Regen Projects is pleased to present What delineates the edge, Kevin Beasley’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Since 2007, Beasley has been focused on unifying diverse aspects of his wide-reaching practice, emphasizing their throughlines and connections. Featuring new wall-mounted slab works and freestanding sculptures, What delineates the edge brings together a range of elements that characterize Beasley’s work, including his innovative use of resin to create translucent surfaces that elevate everyday objects into luminous compositions rich with history and memory. The exhibition takes as its central concept the notion of the threshold, inviting a deep consideration of the meeting points and boundaries between entities and states of being.

Beasley’s sculptural freestanding screens rely on this signature use of resin as well as the incorporation of bedsheets, military uniforms, shoes, hats, wood, carbon fiber, and denim to spatially organize the exhibition in a configuration that prompts improvisatory exploration. Intended to serve as armatures for the meanings and memories intrinsic to the materials, the screens’ partitions function as windows opening from one screen onto another, and into the surrounding space. The addition of hinges, and the multipaneled nature of the work, bring a new mobility and mutability to Beasley’s work, while underlining the physical space of the threshold as a tangible and metaphorical site that holds and generates meaning.

Surrounding the sculptural screens are Beasley’s wall-mounted Synths –– large resin panels embedded with raw Virginia cotton, chipped pool cues, shoelaces, fiberglass, t-shirts, components of personal protective equipment (PPE), and other materials arranged in colorful, abstract compositions. Sometimes clearly recognizable, sometimes more mysteriously obscured within resin or by painterly gesture, these elements are at once deeply personal to Beasley’s family history, and more broadly culturally resonant, speaking to shared experiences of history and collective memory. Taking their title from musical synthesizers, which generate and manipulate electrical signals to produce sound, the Synths function as devices that translate these intangibles into a legible visual frequency. Evocative of fossils preserved in amber or densely layered circuit boards, they compress layers of material and meaning into polyphonic, unified forms. Bringing these together with Beasley’s sculptural screens, which offer a newly embodied experience of the work, What delineates the edge presents and provokes complex engagement with notions of materiality, time, and the individual and social significance of quotidian objects.