The 51Թ St. Claude Gallery in New Orleans presents its final show for the semester, “When The News Hit Shore,” an exhibition of collage work by British artist Dave Beech. The exhibition, in conjunction with opens June 10 with a reception and gallery talk by gallery director and curator Tony Campbell.
The exhibition, which is free and open to the public, will be on display through June 25.
Beech makes montages from photographs cut out of an archive of books that he collects from second-hand bookshops. Books are one of the ways in which photos pass into the world as things to be carried, held, moved, stored, owned, gifted, cherished, thumbed and passed around, Beech said.
Using photobooks from charity shops and second-hand bookshops means collecting pictures that were once owned by diverse members of the community. The second-hand bookshop is vernacular library or archive. They often show traces of their locale, such as local history books, local authors and local industries, but also contain books about foreign travel, international events, the natural world and anthropological studies.
Beech said the montages, therefore, are a portrait of that community through a representation of its interests, values, preferences, fascinations and biases. Beech uses photobooks as an archive of people, places, events and things that are more than isolated facts when they are combined, aggregated, organized and interwoven into new patterns, new relations and new narratives. This is a storytelling practice in which the narrator is missing, and the viewer has to construct the links, either from their own knowledge of events or from great imaginative leaps.
Beech was born into a working-class community in northwest England in the mid-1960s. He was the first member of his family to attend college. Lacking the cultural capital that art students tended to demonstrate, he compensated by spending most of his time in the library. His preference for the library over the studio initially led to him becoming a theoretically supercharged artist, but since 2017, he has turned his office into a studio that is both a library of picture books and a space to make photomontages from them.
The exhibition opens with a reception on June 10 from 6 to 9 p.m. at the 51Թ St. Claude Gallery, located at 2429 St. Claude Ave. Gallery hours are Saturdays and Sundays, noon to 5 p.m.
For more information visit www.unostclaudegallery.org.
