WALEAD BESHTY

Beshty’s “Bandit Sign Painting” series takes its title from a term denoting any sign attached to public or private property without official approval. These signs may be innocuous or mundane — postings for apartments for rent or freelance services — but they can also indicate more nefarious ventures, solicitations for shadowy businesses that hint at an illicit economy operating at the margins. Beshty began collecting these signs during the global financial crisis of 2007 – 2008. The signs were free, easily available, and served as a real-time index of a seminal historical moment. The artist stenciled them onto the front pages of newspapers and used oil stick to smear thick layers of color on the easily smudged newsprint; the oil soaked through the newsprint, rendering the paper translucent and creating a viscous protective layer. By enlarging the signs proportionally, Beshty creates an effect whereby the letters seem to loom threateningly over the viewer — a visual mimesis of the perceptual experience of those who might seek out the signs in moments of desperation. The amalgamation of materials, including whole newspapers, glue, and personal documents, are painted in tones that recall the Southern California landscape.

In dialogue with the “Bandit Signs” are Beshty’s cigarette drawings. As with the works employing the bandit signs, Beshty focuses here on a specific element of material culture to draw out larger implications about value and worth. Beshty began the series while installing an exhibition in Naples. During this time, it was discovered that Italian Coast Guard crews tasked with intercepting refugees crossing the Mediterranean from Libya were themselves implicated in a coordinated smuggling operation in which cigarettes and prescription drugs such as Viagra and Cialis purchased on the black market were being smuggled into the European Union. The illegal dumping of refugees in international waters was used as a cover for their smuggling operation, creating an unsettling parallel in which the value of the commercial object was concurrent with the callous devaluation of human life.

If the “Bandit Sign Paintings” and cigarette drawings draw our focus to major global and social phenomena, another body of work in the exhibition returns to the intimate and local. Black-and-white photographs taken on the street adjacent to Beshty’s studio, situated on the dividing line between Boyle Heights and Commerce, show the point of confluence between a suburban residential neighborhood and a zone of heavy industry. Makeshift shelters and RVs line the street one after the other and are presented here frame after frame in a manner reminiscent of so-called “de-skilled” or “conceptual” photography from the 1970s. The inclusion of these photographs quite literally brings the exhibition’s vast concerns — value and worth, humanity and commerce, geography and migration — back home, emphasizing that they are not foreign or distant, but rather part of a network of circulation in which we are all bound up.

Profit & Loss is on view at Regen Projects November 7 – December 21, 2024.

A statement by the artist with further information can be read here upon the opening of the exhibition: Beshty, Walead, ”Profit & Loss Statement,” 2024