Blaze Orange

If there is one thing certain about Erik Beehn’s work, it’s unpredictability; transition; experimentation; exploration. Okay so that’s four things. Regardless, Beehn is a Las Vegas- based artist and educator who’s master printer training in Los Angeles and MFA education from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago have combined into an alchemical process. Beehn’s imagery of flowers, targets, squares and lace start as stable focal points for the chaos that ensues: painting on photographs to rephotograph and erase through the photograph with solvents; then again photographed and painted on top, to add layers of collage on top of that— bouncing back and forth between building up surfaces with marks and removing them with chemicals and other processes. Beehn works his magic until the resulting image breathes new life, though now a foggy abstract memory of its origins. He is no stranger to the effects of transparency, drips, photochemicals, paint, Ben-Day dots and color separations: combinations that speak to ideas of transformational growth, trust, and finding beauty in entropy.