Kevin Beasley at Regen Projects

At Regen Projects in Hollywood, a layered soundtrack of whirring machinery, chirping crickets, and the occasional screech of a car fills the gallery. This layered audio track emanates from a central utility pole installed in the middle of Kevin Beasley’s solo exhibition “On Site.” LEDs and various poles sprout off of the central wooden post, which also spawns audio cables strung through the gallery and connected to speakers, each playing a different field recording that the artist took at a site of personal relevance (his family farm in Virginia, the streets of New York City, where he lives). 

Paired with the behemoth sound installation are wall works using Beasley’s signature resin-doused sculptural technique: The artist backfills his panels with clothing and raw cotton from his family’s farm to create intricate, abstract compositions that are ripe with layered material meaning. For “On Site,” Beasley utilized a new technique of dye sublimation which allowed him to transfer photographic images onto store-bought blank T-shirts, which he layers together like puzzle pieces to create each work. These transfered photos hold sentimental resonance, such as his grandmother’s shed in Virginia, or a peach tree on his family’s property. Together, they weave the personal with a larger narrative of industry — the mass produced clothing and resin pushes up against raw Virginian cotton to speak to the insidious histories of cotton production and American industrialization.

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Photo: Kevin Beasley, On Site (installation view) (2022). Image courtesy of the artist and Regen Projects. Photo: Paul Salveson.