For Christopher Beer and Natalie Myers, partnership extends beyond artistic collaboration. The couple’s lives are fused by the rhythmic tasks that chaperon family life. Their household runs in syncopated chaos as they manage child-rearing, finances, work, and the other myriad tasks that endlessly occupy the lives of young parents. Within this daily rhythm, the duo carves out time to create the drawings and multi-media artworks in their series Gesture.
The small studio in the couple’s home has not always been their creative base. They met shortly after college and worked together during the formative years of their artistic practices to create live performances and experimental theater. Their recent studio works retain a frenetic nihilism that was first formulated in the underground music and art scenes that the duo inhabited in the early 2000s. Over time, family life has forced their focus inward and their pallet of visual influences has expanded to include points of reference related to parenting—a task that is, like their drawings, jointly executed.
Along with phrases and imagery related to domestic life, the series draws on familiar iconography from popular culture, which is frequently double-coded as both an ironic jab and sincere acknowledgement of the emotional resonance of media. These aspects of mainstream entertainment are woven together with autobiography and abstraction to form an unusually salient expression of the complex psychic experience of adult life. Far from representing maturity as we typically see it, the series is peppered with juvenile motifs that attest to the ways adults retain adolescent impulses, which are at times compartmentalized, and at other moments interwoven into the outward expression of self.
The titles in the series echo the erratic mixture of reference points found in each artwork, yet they possess an underlying logic. Each is comprised of three search terms used to find images on the internet that have influenced the couple’s work. The resulting titles become, like any internet search, a jumping off point that splinters outward into unpredictable, and at times arbitrary configurations of information. In this way, Gesture echoes the wandering emotional intensity of both technology and parenting, two forces that profoundly shape identity, yet defy simple explanation.
Once each artwork is complete, Beer and Myers create close-up photographs of particular sections, and transform the resulting images into gifs, online games, artist books, collages, and interactive projects. Their artwork, like their lives, is not static, but rather continuously morphing. Through these many iterations, the duo’s subjective experiences are merged together and continuously reconstructed in unremitting visual complexity.
-Allison Grant
Assistant Curator of Education and Exhibitions, MoCP, Adjunct Faculty, Columbia College Chicago, Artist.
See Paintings here
See Collages here
See Video Paintings here
See Video Painting Stills here