Installation Artist and Painter
Without Liberty and Justice for All
I'm Beth Racette, an installation artist and painter. Thanks for visiting my website.
My goal when I make art is to utilize and
integrate my entire brain, body and spirit. Making art is about emancipation:
individual and collective. This entails excavating desires and gaining emotional
understanding while simultaneously analyzing societal structures, human
development and future possibilities.
I do installations because they encourage the audience to be present in
the immediate time and space and to be aware of their bodies within the
environment. This feels crucial to
me because we live in a time when 2-dimensional electronic media dominate more
of people's time, often alienating people from their bodily experience. In
addition, because installations usually aren't for sale, they don't trigger
people's desires to own objects as much as other artworks.
This subversion of the desire to possess objects helps lead the audience
to a more reflective experience and encourages public discourse.
In
my installations I look at relationships between sociopolitical themes.
Social structure has been a frequent focus in my work.
I endeavor to put our society's prominent ideologies into tangible
physical form to assist myself (and viewers) to understand humanity and
human evolution. My works function as visual poems in which objects and the
relationships between them trigger feelings and ideas. I work with found and
created objects, recycling the familiar and unfamiliar debris of human life,
molding them into something that allows a new look at society and a new
understanding of self. Since an installation is not something one purchases or
possesses, instead of stimulating a desire to consume, my works create a space
for conversation and the process of puzzling through feelings and questions.
I want
my installations to function as visual poems —where the objects and
relationships between or juxtaposition of objects trigger thoughts, feelings and
concepts. My strategy in working
with found and existing objects is to recycle the debris of society and assist
people (and myself) to understand human development — past, present and
future. Through working with
familiar objects which are loaded with a variety of meanings and connotations, I
intend for the work to be accessible to a wide audience.
My paintings are meditative and improvisational mental maps. They reflect my mental activity about the world. They are pure exploration. They are about flow of ideas, growth, playfulness, contagion, biology, social structure and communication (etc). They are my desire to balance randomness and control. They are my musings about the natural world and the world of human constructs -- and my attempt to understand the relationship between the two.
Thanks again for looking at my work.
Contact me at: bracette@gmail.com