NEIL BEEDIE

’CHIMERA FLUSH’
3 JUNE – 10 JULY, 2021

ARTIST STATEMENT

‘And as the plumes flutter in the current they spell out * * * * *

but I don’t believe my eyes, it’s only a ghost’s habit.’

- Frank O’Hara

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It can be hard to know where you start and finish when the house lights go down.

Neil Beedie, “Chimera Flush”, installation view, dimensions variable, 2020. Photography by Zan Wimberley.

Projections, like monsters, often come at us from behind, when we’re lost in the dark, groping for ways ahead. They’re also the perfect places to reveal yourself. A how’d-it-find-us? jumps the where’d-it-go’s only to shudder what-came-backinstead? I guess it’s always all about dissolving boundaries. Witnessing history’s guttersnipes hitching rides and wreaking havoc, snaking elision with creation myth parodies that trouble invention like a misbehaving Pygmalion. All those cautionary tales just making with the mercurial mood rings and spider dancing through time like a Lola Montez through the empires. And some Bavarian general just yells ‘demon!’

Anything to sidestep the ‘natural order’. What a busted paragon. Derek Jarman says history, with its pointed lacks and omissions, is mutable in the imagination. Like dream logics, lit with Magick Lanterns, a stage door on meta-loop or the dizzy spell of a film flashback. Cutting in. Redefining focus. Divining backwards with forward motion and shaking up the stacks to pilfer in the fallout. When Parker Tyler said he’d wear an everchanging chiaroscuro in his picture house, I wonder if he knew that I was there, in the beams, trying them on too, just to see what fit. Kicking up in this constant sense of disintegration and play is disorientating, but isn’t half the point just finding your feet again?

Neil Beedie, Magnets, oil on canvas, 20.5 x 25.5cm, 2021. — Neil Beedie, *Magnets*, oil on canvas, 20.5 x 25.5cm, 2021.

The private moviehouse is a fabulation, a reckoning with thresholds, entropy and dreams. I’m pretty sure it was Bunny Lang who said that squashed somewhere in our hearts are the footprints of all the monsters who have kept us alive. And I think that’s true. Our own ‘peeping toms’, spilling from the cracks with an inexhaustible beauty, with illicit substances, mirrors and stories. Yeah, reemergence is a thrilling pastime. They’re projections you see. Melodies from malady. Phantasies and history. Fear cum desire. I think this is the stuff we’re really made of. Rarified in the dark and sleuthing in the curtains when the lights comes up.

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