ROBERT BECK/ROBERT BUCK AT THE RENNIE COLLECTION

There is roughly a week or so left fo visit the Rennie Collections most recent exhibition: Robert Beck / Robert Buck, it closes on the 8th of June, sign up for a guided tour of the collection's stunning space. The work is inquisitive and challenging.

Rennie Collection is proud to present the first Canadian exhibition of American artist Robert Beck/Robert Buck from March 2 to June 8, 2013. A catalogue will accompany the exhibition, with an essay by James Voorhies.

In 2008, Robert Beck changed his surname by a single vowel to Buck. This act of artistic self-nomination, a work of art itself, was precipitated by what he had achieved through his work as Beck, which was often autobiographical in content and persistently diverse in form. As an alias, Buck appealed to the artist for its precision and associations: stag, son, cash, to throw off. To substantiate this artistic transfiguration, Buck created the shrine (from e to u), 2012, a makeshift memorial of candles, flowers, and stuffed animals. The transitory work, susceptible to entropy and the elements, provocatively re-frames the now-common practice in which a community marks the site of a violent event, a fatality or loss, as a place of collective mourning.

Working in various mediums (drawing, sculpture, photography, and video) the artist utilizes many artistic procedures, including appropriation and installation. He has returned repeatedly to the universal themes of family, memory, identity, authorship, and loss. While his own singular experiences are central, Beck wittingly withholds information to solicit the viewer's own unique associations. Beck has described his work as a way to “create an index by which I could make sense of earlier, often traumatic experiences [...] so to transcend them. Evidence of this riddles my work: bodies, holes, camouflage, mimicry, memorials, erasure, guilt, corruption, sex, and death – even my own! And so much of it is haunted by the presence (or is it the absence) of the Father.” Beyond his own father, Beck is referring to the Name-of-the-Father, a psychoanalytic term, via the Church, that designates one's given name, as well as the symbolic order of things.