Beck H. Slack

“Beck is not one to care to master, nor do they engage in any mechanisms to ascertain full visibility in their actions or art. Like Beck’s work itself, there is erosion, wayfaring, entropy, yet empathy and inclusion to behave as debris. There isn’t orthodoxy toward, nor rebellion against, but, instead, an incredible pliancy in the face of agency and power relations within aesthetic appearance.”

Beck Slack (b.1999) is an
artist born from the
American Midwest.

For "Fishing Out the Foul Frog (in my throat)" GSA MFA degree show - This installation work bears many sentiments. Acts of sending and receiving, vitality and decay, warmth and escapism all meld together in an eerie, liminal landscape. Through gifts of former mentors, inherited artifacts of dead relatives, and the ghostings of sites passed; one finds themselves amongst an anti-futurist divide of being-in-the-present and presence as the continuous looming of “what haunts”. The pieces presented here rift a triangulated divide of the artist's own position within institutional presence. In creating points of reference between the folk warnings of their childhood, the works of past MFA alumni, and the literal rotting of both the venue and school’s infrastructure (architecturally and culturally), there emerges a gnawing tension of institutional critique through hauntological means. Amidst it all, one thing remains consistent: an unspeakable kind of hesitancy that comes to light.