Since the mid-1970s, Ericka Beckman (b. 1951, Hampstead, NY) has forged a signature visual language in film, video, installation, and photography. Often shot against black, spatially ambiguous backdrops, her moving image works are structured according to the logic of child’s play, games, folklore, or fairy tales, and populated by archetypical characters and toy-like props in bright, primary colours. Throughout her work, Beckman engages profound questions of gender, role-playing, competition, power and control. The publication will include selected works spanning thirty years of Beckman’s career, providing the first opportunity to survey her contribution to the art world. With new scholarly essays on Beckman’s work that offer an art-historical consideration of her early Super-8 Films and a critical situating of the artist’s ongoing preoccupation with the structures of games, gambling, and capitalism, the exhibition catalogue contextualizes Beckman’s practice on the occasion of this major survey exhibition. More than 20 colour images in the catalogue include photo- documentation of Beckman’s works since 1983 and installation views of the MIT List Center exhibition.
