Becket Bowes

Slowfax, N5th/Bedford location

June 7 – July 4

Slowfax is pleased to present work by Becket Bowes for the storefront window display at its Bedford location. Come stop by during the month of June to view his installation, which consists of a wallpapered image (pictured above), polyhedron sculpture, and mirrored window.

Becket Bowes’ work explores the nature of order and collapse in elaborate projects involving mathematics and information theory. In spring 2010, Bowes presented his first solo show at Rachel Uffner Gallery in the Lower East Side, which was composed of a series of text paintings and sculptures that highlighted art’s attempt to communicate, and its inevitable failure to do so. His work relied on the beauty of this “abstraction,” as he called it, manifested in his sofa and domino sculptures. Bowes’ ready-made sofa, Char (couch), 2010, missing two of its legs, precariously hinged on function and non-function, inviting visitors into its unstable state. In Der tatsächliche Lauf der Dinge (The Way Things Really Go), 2010, an homage to Fischli and Weiss’s 1987 video work, Bowes painted and arranged colorful domino pieces in a trail on the floor. The dominoes stood too far apart to interact, much less communicate. Bowes used sculpture to hint at language’s inescapable failure.

In 2009, Bowes exhibited his Social Isolate Club [sic] at SculptureCenter in Long Island City as part of its “In Practice” emerging artists program. The mission of the club was to define the nature of human isolation and decay through the lens of behavioral science. Composed of a sofa, a desk, a library, and a collection of objects, Bowes and the club met over the course of the exhibition to discuss the significance of the objects on display (among them, two Ships of Theseus, a Comfortable Chair, a simulation of Alan Turing’s death mask and a model of his bust spinning on a computer monitor). Bowes then transferred notes from the meetings into webpages on the site [sic]ipedia, which closely resembles Wikipedia in its neutral gray background and simple user-friendly format. Bowes essentially created another user content-generated site with hyperlinks pointing to articles within [sic]ipedia. Together, [sic]ipedia and Social Isolate Club suggested parallels between reading hypertext and viewing an installation: both give the viewer a degree of autonomy in ordering information and making connections. The wallpaper in Slowfax’s window display is an image taken from the [sic]ipedia page, the Last Fax Machine.     –Misa Jeffereis

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Becket Bowes (b. 1976, Grand Junction, CO) has participated in group exhibitions at SculptureCenter, Marvelli Gallery, Andrew Kreps, and Swiss Institute, New York; and Palais de Tokyo, Paris, among others. In 2010, a solo show, Failure Canon, was held at Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York. Bowes holds an M.F.A. from Hunter College and a B.F.A. from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, Vancouver, BC. He works in Chinatown.