Emocean

Dawn Beebe. Nov 16-Dec 8, 2023

Part of an emerging artist collection, Emocean showcases Dawn Beebe’s 2022-2023 series of two and three-dimensional work, which aims to explore new materials and utilize growing skillsets, demonstrating her expanding artistic practice.

Beebe’s work is interdisciplinary and includes not only sculpture and printmaking but also drawing, painting, photography, fabric art, and outdoor cement works. Her vision is to investigate the world in an organic yet practical manner using colour, design, found, or recycled materials.

The work is not only visual, but also needs to be purposeful, touched, heard, or used. Art allows her to present part of herself to the public without using words. She is inspired by contrasts and differences, how objects relate to one another, and how this affects the overall environment. Repeated images and patterns appear in much of her work due to her childhood memories of her mother’s preference for striped shirts. Her current projects reflect a need to re-create these memory patterns in black and white, and in colour.

A Emocean 1 evokes emotion evident in the visible waves of black and white bamboo tubes. Emocean 2 projects colour through the tubes, fading and then brightening in hue. The genesis of this project occurred by placing tubes of bamboo on her cell phone flashlight. Altering the bamboo height provided another opportunity to simulate “waves” of emotion building and then fading.

B – Purple Rain is comprised of a four-foot square wooden trellis suspended from the ceiling draped with fabric strips in various shades of purple. On the floor are “raindrops”, scattered bits of purple cloth.  As the viewer enters the installation, an audio file plays “Purple Rain” by Prince and the Revolution mashed with sounds of thunder and rain. “Purple Rain” is a song about being with the one you love when the world ends in a purple rain. Pausing in the middle, the viewer is cocooned by the gently swaying intensely purple fabric, while the susurrus of the music and the fabric reflect purple light.

C – Exploring a new avenue in working with cement, Mirrored is a shattered mirror that gently spins within the pyramidal framework of neurons and dendrites, offering the viewer a glimpse of themselves in reflection but caught within the frame.