Felix Beaudry at Tatjana Pieters

Artist: Felix Beaudry

Exhibition title: Old Man Essentials

Venue: Tatjana Pieters, Ghent, Belgium

Date: June 24 – September 10, 2023

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Tatjana Pieters

Tatjana Pieters is pleased to welcome you to ‘Old Man Essentials’, the first solo exhibition in Europe at the gallery by upcoming American artist Felix Beaudry. The artist’s practice centers around knitting. He programs an automated knitting machine to create tapestries and soft sculpture. Beaudry creates a back and forth between the hand and machine by painting in preperation for his tapestries as well as hand manipulating the fabric once it is knit.

Through his use of texture, colour and imagery, Felix co-opts mythology to depict scenes from his memories and fantasies. These narratives portray his relation to gender as something evolving in his body, and in the culture and media around him. The gap between Beaudry’s initial visual projection, and what is actually born from the machine, beautifully mirrors transition as a space of desire.

In this exhibition Beaudry explores the gap between intimacy and space. The artist invites us to enter through the construction of a large tent. He designed the tent using architectural models as well as his knowledge of patterning garments to illustrate the way in which a tent extends from the personal space of clothing to the communal space of dwellings. By making the tent Beaudry wanted to describe how a person becomes connected to a group and how that group or being becomes integrated into the nature around them.

‘(…) I began to think about a specific camping trip that my parents used to organize the first week of every summer break from when I was about 11 to when I was 19. Our family and a group of other families and friends would canoe down a river in Northern California and camp for around four nights at the same spot next to a small waterfall. It was a yearly ritual that had many familiar components but each year was a different group of people, we were older and more familiar with the routine. These years were crucial as I was trying to understand myself as a man and as an adult, what type of person I wanted to be in a community that was very interdependent yet temporary. I used photos from some of those trips for the ‘dishwashers’ and the ‘rock arrangers’ to create gouche paintings which I scanned and programmed to make the tapestries.

I moved away from thinking about camping equipment in terms of aesthetics towards a focus on the emotional significance that camping equipment begins to have when it has been used for years. There is a ritual in setting up and taking down a camp. Because camping imposes limitations on how much you can bring each item becomes more significant because it is aiding in your survival or it’s a luxury that you are specially aware of. The act of setting up and taking down a tent becomes a time to consider the need for shelter, to define what you need to sleep comfortably.

Camping within a tent puts each person in intimate proximity to one another while outside they also have to rely on one another to get their basic needs met. The tent becomes an empty being with nylon skin and aluminum bone where a group of people can become a sum of their parts. Camping becomes a place where your identity becomes permeable, where you see yourself in relation to other people rather than by what makes you unique. (…)’

– Felix Beaudry

Felix Beaudry (US, 1996) lives and works in New York, US. He graduated with a BFA in Textiles from Rhode Island School of Design, New York (US) in 2018. Solo exhibitions include The Glob Mother and Congenital Knot at SITUATIONS, New York (US). Selected group exhibitions include were held at Tatjana Pieters, Ghent (BE), The Bunker, Miami (US), RISD Museum, Providence (US), New Discretions, New York (US), ltd, Los Angeles (US), Condo, Shanghai (CN), Golestani Gallery, Düsseldorf (DE). His work is part of collections in the US, Argentina and Belgium. His installation ‘The Glob Mother’ (2022) is currently on view in ‘Purple Prose’ curated by Kory Trolio at Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York (US).