Rollin Beamish is an artist and educator based in Bozeman, Montana, where he works as a Professor of Painting and Drawing and coordinator of the MFA Program in Studio Art at the Montana State University School of Art. His studio practice is rooted in his interest in media literacy, the symbolic efficacy of imagery, and the ambiguous mystique of the handmade as it relates between and within a media landscape predicated upon digital flows of information. Though his work is heavily informed by politics, political economy, and philosophy, he hopes to imbue viewers with a sense of intimate visual and haptic curiosity rather than with a didactic transmission of information. Since Rollin feels that his work is “thinking” five years ahead of him, he relishes the notion that someone else might have a better read of it than he does.

The pieces Rollin began at ´ace interrelate conceptually to a series he’s been working on with the tentative title “a Dept. – Beasts of Melancholia”. With this series, he hopes to reflect on and emotionally confront the declining power and influence of the US American Empire, a sequence of events that seem inevitably poised to wash the world in absurdity and horror in equal measure. As such, a reflection on the histories and possibilities of multipolarity seems appropriate. Rollin opted to shift to a caricature of Hayden Davis, a US American crypto-bro who currently has his own (in)famous relation to the Argentine economy. At the same time, he started work on several text-based pieces that attempt to reflect conceptually on some of the absurdities of the present moment, from the philosophical “sublation” of dubious economic calculations, to the “raging standstill” that seems to so often describe his own inability to respond to what’s going on. Some of these inclinations for Rollin’s work were well reflected by ´ace’s own Andrés Knob, who once in conversation remarked that Argentina was never subjected to much in the way of natural disasters – except for the IMF.

ARTIST STATEMENT

My work consists of drawing and painting characterized by free-hand image-making along with graphic and text elements and installation. My recent work is often characterized by satire and caricature that is motivated by an inquiry into what constitutes the symbolic efficacy of so-called late-capitalist society. I’m curious about the extent to which fictional or symbolic objects mingle with or supersede actual events or subjects while also reflecting on the conceptual effects of categorical/institutional reification. Themes in my work are either cited from a variety of sources or invented outright and the pieces that result usually serve as components for mixture in installation. Though my work might be considered “political”, I broadly refute such a description out of a respect for what I believe the properly political truly entails – i.e. collective action with radical emergence (the articulation of a “wrong” by “the part of no part”, as Jacques Rancière might put it). Artwork is collective or collaborative in a different way, far more contingent and inchoate, and how it might relate to action can be quite ambiguous. Apropos, I respect alternate interpretive conclusions that might emerge from viewers of my work, regardless of their familiarity with my references or intentions. To put this another way, I’m a big fan of Jean Cocteau’s bon mot, “an artist cannot speak about (their) work any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.”