BETH LIPMAN: One-Self I Sing
Muskegon Museum of Art
296 W. Webster Avenue
Muskegon, MI
On view permanently
ABOUT THE INSTALLATION
One’s-Self I Sing is a large-scale, site- specific installation that investigates the current moment in relation to Deep Time. The sculpture, measuring approximately 180” x 120” x 48”, can be thought of as an “exploded” still life, a genre that holds the capacity to illuminate the ways that we understand our world through visual metaphors.
The sculpture will converge both floors of the new expansion, offering a visual continuity between multiple landings. Different aspects of the composition will be discovered upon entering the museum, ascending/descending the stairs or viewing from the second floor. Objects that reference to the Muskegon Museum of Art’s permanent collection will be incorporated. The marriage of transparent cultural objects and opaque rock formations alludes to what is seen and known juxtaposed with what is concealed and lost over time.
One’s-Self I Sing will be permanently installed in the Fall of 2024.
ABOUT BETH LIPMAN
American, b. 1971, New York, NY
lives and works in Sheboygan Falls, WI
Beth Lipman is an American artist whose sculptural practice generates from the Still Life genre, symbolically representing the splendor and excess of the Anthropocene and the stratigraphic layer humanity will leave on earth. Assemblages of inanimate objects and domestic interiors, inspired by private spaces and public collections, propose portraits of individuals, institutions, and societies.
Temporality and mortality-primary concerns linked to the Still Life tradition are heightened through materiality. Works in glass, wood, metal, photography, and video disrupt the mechanisms of fixed, grand narratives in order to emphasize evanescence at the heart of ‘vanitas’. Sculptural processes become analogies for life cycles, pointing to systems both natural and human that must continually adapt in order to survive.
The works are a meditation on our relationship to Deep Time, a monumental time scale based on geologic events that minimizes human lives. Each installation is a reimagining of history, created by placing cycles often separated by millennia in proximity, from the ancient botanical to the cultural. The incorporation of prehistoric flora alludes to the impermanence of the present and the persistence of life. The ephemera of the Anthropocene become a symbol of fragility as the human species is placed on a continuum where time eradicates hierarchy.
Lipman has received numerous awards including a USA Berman Bloch Fellowship, Pollock Krasner Grant, Virginia Groot Foundation Grant, and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant. She recently completed One Portrait of One Man, a sculptural response to Marsden Hartley for the Weisman Art Museum (MN). Lipman has exhibited her work internationally at such institutions as the Ringling Museum of Art (FL), ICA/MECA (ME), RISD Museum (RI), Milwaukee Art Museum (WI), Gustavsbergs Konsthall (Sweden) and the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum (DC). Her work has been acquired by numerous museums including the North Carolina Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art (NY), Smithsonian American Art Museum (DC), and the Corning Museum of Glass (NY).