Exploring Art and Language in Brooklyn

When I first met Fort Greene, Brooklyn-based artist Doug Beube, it was tough not feel an immediate connection to him, both as a person and as an artist. My family and I were lucky to meet Doug a few months ago, and now consider him among our closest friends. His warm personality, creativity and passion for art really shine.

Doug’s “mixed media” art explores language (more so, it’s about physically revising text, and giving it new meaning) while offering commentary on politics, culture, the environment and other issues of our time.

This weekend, Doug hosted an open studio series, Emendation:

“Emandation is a display of the artist’s ongoing and often times polemical dialogue with western culture’s relationship to information, the written word and the natural world. The exhibition spans Beube’s lengthy career covering tremendous thematic ground, including references from Greek Antiquity through contemporary historical methods. Beube’s artistic pursuits channel a very delicate balance both personal and global. Intellectually playing with his varied subjects it is his chosen material, the book, that unpacks the contour of his work overall, where even our most sacred and historical achievements are not immune to change and, perhaps, risks extinction.”

About the Melt Installation (Pictured above):

“Marking the first day of the series is Melt, an environmentally sensitive two day installation involving a politically dynamic sextet of books selected and amended according to their content. Each book incised with text, such as the words JUST/ICE paired with Tom Maloney’s U.S. Camera ’62, ICE/CAP with The National Geographic Society’s As We Live We Breath, and corresponding to Alfred Knoff’s Arsenals of Foley are inscribed the words RED/ACT. The frozen books are housed in a steel frame alongside an audio component registered to make live a global and personal transformation and meltdown. The ice run-off is then bottled and branded sm/ART Water. This new installation animates Beube’s dialogue of socio-political conditions, cultures of violence both physical and psychological, and those structures existing to support the inverse of the latter. Taking place at Beube’s Brooklyn brownstone studio, Melt‘s conditional properties leverage the anachronistic technology of the book into the environment directly.”