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Container or music series
Wash
Wellington 2020
Doug Beube
This installation features a collection of specially crafted soap bars etched with racial slurs and epithets. Carefully set onto a wall of soap dishes, this arrangement invites participants to wash their hands with a bar, letting the ink flow from the letters and mix with the white suds and lather. The work explores what it is to be the object of ethnic, religious, sexist or homophobic insults, asking what it might take to cleanse disdainful speech from the collective consciousness.
“We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. “
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “Remaining Awake through a Great Revolution." March 31, 1968
Through altered bookwork, collage, mixed media, paper, photography, and sculpture, Doug Beube's work often explores the book as an object, as a seemingly antiquated technology that is still purposeful in a digital age. He applies quasi-software functions such as cutting, pasting and hypertext onto an analog system. Doug Beube is a mixed media artist working in bookwork, collage, sculpture and photography. He received his BFA in Film in 1974 from York Univ. in Toronto, Canada and his MFA in Photography from the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY in 1983. Prior to receiving his MFA in Photography, he was darkroom assistant to Minor White in Arlington, MA. From 1993-2012 he was curator of, The Allan Chasanoff Bookwork Collection.
Doug has taught classes in artists’ books, collage, mixed-media and photography at various universities throughout Canada and the US. In addition he teaches workshops at the Penland School, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts and The Center for Book Arts in NYC, to mention just a few. He regularly lectures on his artwork throughout Canada, Europe and the US. Doug exhibits extensively both nationally and internationally and his bookwork and photographs are in numerous private and public collections. In the fall of 2011 a monograph entitled, Doug Beube: Breaking the Codex was published.
Supported by Wellington City Council Public Art Fund
