Utility Suite covered in Art New England Magazine

Art New England, September/October 2019

Utility Suite: Natalie Beall

Standard Space - Sharon, CT - standardspace.net - August 30–September 29, 2019

What are the interior lives of the furniture that we live with? Natalie Beall’s solo show, Utility Suite, at Standard Space offers a glimpse into an imagined world where objects move beyond their functionality. Beall mines thrift stores, antique shops and discarded curbside items around New York City and within her small town in upstate New York for items that form the springboard for her work. In the living room of her home, a glimmer on the edge of a heater grate caught her attention. Stripping away layers of paint, Beall unearthed its copper base. This grate became the subject of one of her reductive collages as well as a wall sculpture composed, in part, from gray felt floor pads. Both are included in Beall’s exhibition which also features around a dozen similar collages–all Untitled, sized roughly 25.4 x 19.5 inches, and vertical in orientation–alongside two other wall sculptures.

On Beall’s website, she includes examples of her source imagery, some of which have seemingly precise (often defunct) purposes such as a cast iron receipt spike or a shelf with a peculiar silhouette. Beall sketches these found objects, which she then transforms into portraits of unrecognizable, unnameable objects. She works with a limited palette of colored papers, subtle hues and neutral tones that recall those found in a stately interior decorating catalog. The furniture loses its usability and becomes flattened through the process of collage, yet the evidence of their former lives remains in Beall’s reimagined versions, detected in the netting, fasteners or hooks. This gesture–”transcendent and failing” as Beall described–embodies hopeful, humorous and deadpan overtones across these depictions of offbeat objects. 

Growing up, Beall’s mother was crafty, sewing matching bedspreads and curtains in her childhood home. As Beall began her career as an artist, she often teetered between conflicting perceptions of purpose and decoration. Beall’s work advances abstracted versions of the things that inhabit the domestic realm. Her collages and sculptures, with their vestiges of utility, strike a balance between sophistication and accessibility and are at their strongest when they release a frisson of the uncanny.

-Jacquelyn Gleisner

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"Utility Suite" opens at Standard Space on August 31

Please join me on August 31 from 5:30–8pm at Standard Space in Sharon, CT for the opening of my solo exhibition Utility Suite, comprising recent sculpture and collage.

Standard Space is pleased to present Utility Suite, an exhibition of new work by Natalie Beall.

Natalie Beall creates forms that are recognizable without being identifiable–reminiscent of everyday objects but not representative. Her translation of ordinary objects into abstracted collages and sculptures allow them to transcend their traditional roles, suggesting latent possibilities and unknown functions.

She develops her vocabulary of enigmatic forms from objects she finds in antique and thrift stores, on the street, and in her own home. The color schemes of her cut-paper collages are cohesive but not muted: navy blue, brown, taupe, ochre, and forest green, with orange, pale blue, and touches of red. Bold forms are balanced with delicate details of chain, netting, and woven strands. In related sculptures, gray felt rug pads are repurposed and combined with window screen, wood, and clay into wall-hanging forms evoking utilitarian objects.

Natalie Beall earned her BFA from the University of Georgia and her MFA from Columbia University. She was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts/New York State Council on the Arts Fellowship in Printmaking/Drawing/Book Arts in 2017 and a Lighthouse Works Fellowship in 2014. Beall’s work has been exhibited at multiple venues, including the Wassaic Project, The Lower East Side Printshop, and The Cooper Union. She lives and works in Salt Point, New York.