NADA Miami 2024

For the past decade, Maine-based Tad Beck has consistently pushed the boundaries of photography by using “re-photography” to create images that are in fact the product of a number of photographic moments, either by taking pictures of pictures or by using an initial exposure as a reference point or staging ground for another. His most recent project, “Scrying,” explore the complex relationship between photography, memory, and the occult. “Scrying” models Beck’s structuralist relationship to the camera—his commitment to stretching or extending the camera’s capacities and attributes to test what a photograph is or can do—activated here through an investigation of his own childhood toys, loves, and fears. Joining the artist’s formal and conceptual concerns with some of the most unabashedly personal subject matter of his oeuvre to date, the exhibition is among the artist’s most sophisticated, yet also most accessible, and a triumph of retinal pleasure and psychological depth.

Taking its name from the divinatory practice of gazing into a medium from which revelation may arise—a crystal ball, a mirror—“Scrying” began with a series of photographs drawing on Beck’s childhood delight in gazing through glass marbles, which he recently came to consider a primal experience of the satisfaction of experiencing objects and scenes through a lens. Making use of his longstanding practice of (re-)photographing images through refractive surfaces and substances, Beck photographed images of his beloved childhood toys through those very same marbles, generating inverted and distorted portraits of these cherished effects. Paying homage to the work of his teacher Mike Kelley, Beck marries Kelley’s use of stuffed animals as symbols for cultural practices and psychological phenomena with his own photographic methods. Perennially stimulated by questions of artistic influence and legacy, Beck places these images in brightly colored, painted frames in a fashion clearly inspired by Sarah Charlesworth’s 1983-1988 series “Objects of Desire.”