Welcome to Schröde Island, with Leah Beeferman

Leah Beeferman is an artist and educator working in digital photography, video, laser-etching, and related practices. Her work is concerned with how we relate to uncertainty—in our lives, in relation to climate change, and within the arts. While the practice has brought her from sandy deserts to Arctic archipelagos, for the past few years Rhode Island’s been home. We had a chat with Leah about her work in advance of this Fridays’ Soft Opening night, at which she’ll be a guest DJ.

The Well (TW): Leah, every other time we speak, you’re on a glacier. Tell us a story.

Leah Beeferman (LB): Oh, well, Svalbard was a wild story. Another wild story is from a short artist fellowship I went on to the Amazon in Ecuador, but that could be a whole interview in and of itself. The rainforest was, of course, itself totally wild—but at that time, [many] Ecuadorians were protesting an increase in tax on oil, and there was a lot going on back in civilization. We felt the effects of the action; it affected our travel in both directions. On the way back, we had to leave the rainforest a day early because an oil-company-owned road we had to pass was nearly closed. We made it back without any issues, but definitely passed heightened security measures on the way back to Quito. And, unrelated, experiencing 24 hour daylight in northern Finland remains totally wild to me.

TW: What’s Svalbard all about?

LB: Svalbard is an Arctic archipelago halfway between the north of Norway and the North Pole. I did a residency on a boat up there in 2012 for a few weeks. It was a totally transformative trip, both personally and for my work as an artist. It changed the way I see and make things, it changed the way I understand the natural world, and it was the first time I had ever been somewhere so remote. It also totally changed the way I understand scale, and I think that was truly fundamental in terms of how I have related to things since. It also began a long-standing interest in the north, which in turn brought me to Finland. In short, Svalbard trip had a lasting impact.

TW: Can you talk a bit more about the light in Finland?

LB: The light in Finland changes so drastically throughout the year… I’ll talk about summer first since it’s so full of light! In June, in Helsinki, the capital city in the south of Finland, there’s roughly 19 hours of light a day. There’s light in the sky from around 4am until about midnight, and the late night/early morning twilight is really something special. It’s an amazing time of year to be there; it’s dark and cold so much of the year—you can imagine the opposite of this 19 hours of daylight in the winter. People spend as much time outside as they can, and it’s amazing to walk or bike or hang out in the late-night light. During the day, the sun is often very strong, at least when the weather is good. It can actually be a lot, especially as it gets warmer in the summers. But the late night / early early morning light is soft and so special. Sunset colors are a little different too. For all these reasons, it is a life dream of mine to spend the month of June in Finland each year. I’ve been lucky to do this a few times, but it would be amazing for it to be  yearly thing!

I’ve also done a bunch of work in Arctic Finland, in a place called Kilpisjärvi. There, in the summer, the sun never actually sets. Dusk lingers and turns into a soft dawn and then it’s daytime again. Overnight the sky turns a few pastel colors, mainly soft yellows and blues. There are no deep sunset colors at all for a few months. It’s wild, taking the train back south after a few weeks up there and seeing a “real” sunset again. 

I’ve experienced winter in Helsinki, but never full 24-hour darkness like you’d get in Kilpisjärvi in December and January. In Helsinki around winter solstice you have light from roughly 9am to 3:30pm, and even at midday if it’s sunny, the sun is at a low angle in the sky (because of the angle of the earth). I find it so fascinating that a place can change so drastically from one time of year to another. 

TW: Semi-frequent trips to the arctic sounds amazing but, also costly. How are you supporting yourself and travels? 

TW: These days, I'm teaching at RISD. It's my main gig. I've been teaching, adjunct and full-time, for the last 6 years or so. I also do freelance work on the side sometimes, and occasionally make some money from art-related work. The last two years I've gotten grants from school to support my work and travel, which has been great. I also received a Fulbright grant in 2016 and that allowed me to spend nine months in Finland. There were periods of time I lived in Helsinki instead of here, teaching and freelancing, too. 

TW:  So you’re selling work though, a gallery?

LB: No, I only occasionally make direct sales. I’d love to make more! I don’t have gallery representation either—also something I’d like, but the commercial art world is hard and finding the right people to work with in that context is hard. Sometimes I get an honorarium for a show or giving a talk, stuff like that. Or sometimes someone asks me to do a music video or something… for example, last year I made three visualizers (here, here, and here) for my friend Holly Waxwing—who is also based in Providence—and his new album, The New Pastoral. So that sort of thing. 

TW: Those visualizers serve as maybe one point of entry to your work, which, while representational, usually involves a high amount of abstraction. When a viewer happens upon your art for the first time, what are you hoping they get? 

LB: My work isn’t usually as upbeat as those visualizers make it seem; my videos often don’t have sound, so they feel like they move much slower. Visually, though, they do connect to much of my work, so I’ll speak about my related photographic work here. I would hope, at first, that a new viewer would notice that there are recognizable subjects—plants, trees, rocks, water—but, because of how they are presented, those subjects change, becoming something slightly different, slightly unfamiliar. A tree is no longer “just” a tree because it’s alongside an image of a leaf at full scale, changing your impression of the scale of the tree. Or two rocks—and their shadows—from two different pictures fuse to become something spatially confusing, no longer “just” two rocks.

Essentially, I want viewers to notice that the subjects remain but something abstract, formal, and spatial creeps in, too, challenging our natural response to these familiar things. I hope that this realization shifts the way a viewer looks at my artwork: I hope they understand that looking at my work is not simply about recognizing the contents of the images, but rather looking more deeply at how the different elements are put together and the experience those decisions elicit. I hope they carry that feeling with them, the feeling that we can look more deeply at familiar things in the world, and that there can be mysteries and new information even within things we think we recognize. 

TW: Let’s explore some examples. Could you pick two images–one from 2024 and the other a decade prior, and talk about how they relate, depart, etc.

Strong Force (Chromodynamics 26)

LB: Certain elements of my work definitely have stylistic and conceptual continuity. But they also evolve and take on different specific meanings or functions in different pieces, depending on the content, context, and what I specifically want to convey. I like the idea that these forms can be so adaptable while in some ways remaining the same.

This blue piece [above] is called Strong Force (Chromodynamics 26), from 2012-15. The images I used in it I took in Svalbard in 2012. The other piece [below] is new, it’s not titled yet. I took the pictures for it in 2023 in Bisti/De-Na-Zin, Navajo land (managed by the Bureau of Land Management) in New Mexico. I haven’t printed it yet, so I don’t have an image of it in its final form, just a jpeg. There are some obvious similarities between the two, like the focus on landscape, the shapes, the collage elements. But despite these similarities, there are a lot of differences for me between these two pieces and what they’re doing.

Untitled

One obvious difference is the digitally-drawn shapes / abstract marks that overlap or interact with the photographic elements in the Strong Force piece. I stopped using those maybe 5 years ago, though lately I’ve been thinking about bringing them back. And there are many less obvious differences. While the Strong Force piece was made with images from Svalbard, I was much less interested in the idea of trying to convey an impression of that place than I am with my current work, the Bisti piece included. That piece, and the larger series it’s a part of, is much more about a relationship between a real landscape and other abstract spaces: specifically the abstract spaces of digital space and of quantum physics. The Bisti piece is meant to intentionally abstract this landscape itself, transforming it into something that references the real thing but does not try to represent it. There’s also an emphasis on shadow and light that is not present in the Strong Force piece. As my work has grown over the last decade, the shapes that I use have developed, gotten more specific, more elaborate, more related to the images they contain. Different landscapes warrant different specificities in those shapes. 

Finally, there are material differences between how the two are produced. The Strong Force piece is a digital c-print on metallic paper,face-mounted to plexiglass. It looks like a screen. The Bisti piece, on the other hand, will be printed on matte paper. These different production choices and materials give off very different impressions. 

TW: Into it. The untitled piece is wild! So you’re a runner. How does that link with art production, mood, and so on? Anything else that keeps you going?

LB: Running helps keep me focused, and it reinforces my interest in processes as much as end results. (Related to running, I'd love to link out to Friends of India Point Park for the amazing workt hey do!). I think I've learned some of my own patterns—say, when an anxious feeling about making a new thing or being uncertain about a new work actually means I'm about to make an exciting discovery. I force myself just to jump in on a new work even when I "don't feel like it” — and I do this with running too, knowing that I’ll always be glad I made the extra push. Making myself work even for an hour or two on something new is a helpful practice. Once it starts to be an actual thing, even just the beginning of one—and not just an idea—I discover questions that I want to answer, and that gets me hooked. I’m also an avid reader...Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, Flights by Olga Tokarczuk, and Rebecca Solnit’s River of Shadows are meaningful and have made an impact on how I think about my work.

TW: We asked about running because some shapes in your work—the outlines of cutouts almost read like running paths (or lakes, or land boundaries); they are organic and familiar but not known. Is there any relationship between moving your body through 3D space and moving the mouse cursor to deconstruct flat images of 3D spaces?

LB: That’s an interesting question! I never thought about it that way, exactly, but I think there’s some truth to what you’re suggesting. I have felt that the process of exploring the photographs and creating those shapes is a second (or third, or fourth) chance to explore the landscapes that they depict. Walking through and photographing the landscape is certainly a first step in investigating and understanding a place. Working with the images allows for a different kind of prolonged engagement, and making those shapes — seeking them out, discovering them in the images — gives me yet another opportunity to explore. 

Taking a picture flattens what was visible in the camera's frame into an image. I then make these shapes to further play with the depth that’s depicted in the images and the flatness of the images themselves, and, as described above, to change the way my viewers see what’s pictured. Trying to create a relationship between the three (or four) dimensions of “the real world” and the two dimensions of the images is really interesting to me. So in a sense, I would say yes, there is a relationship between how I move in the real world and how I move the (digital) brush on the screen.

TW: Thanks for all this, Leah. It’s great getting to learn more about your work and process. What’s coming up; what’s next? 

LB: I'm excited about the work I'm making right now, it's for a solo show at a university gallery in Indiana coming up this August called Cloud-Scale Uncertainties. I feel proud of it on a large scale because of the ways my ideas are coming together through a few different bodies of work: photography-based pieces, video and sound, laser-etchings, 3D scenes, and weather posters. It feels well-rounded in a way that I've never quite had the time or space to explore in a solo show, so that's exciting. Each series uses different kinds of imagery and I'm really looking forward to seeing it all coexist in full for the first time.