Angela Beallor is a visual artist exploring memory, history, and politics. She was a 2015 BRIC Media Arts Fellow. A Jerome Foundation Travel Grant recipient (2013), she traveled to Lithuania, Belarus, and Russia in relation to her project Pink Lenins. Her video, I Want a Baby! REVisited (Lecture) won first place in the 2017 Sofia Queer Forum video competition. Most recently, she wrote, directed, and starred in M.G. (aka I Want a Baby! Reimagined), an experimental, queer adaptation of Tret'iakov's play I Want a Baby!. She has been in residence at CCI Fabrika, Moscow; Vermont Studio Center; Habitable Spaces, Kingsbury, TX, and was once a resident-artist at Flux Factory (NY). Her work has been presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Cleveland, OH) (2017); Smack Mellon (2016); SPACES (2016); Here Art Space, NY (2014); and, in conjunction with Sharon Hayes, in the Whitney Museum of American Art (2012). She holds a BS in Photo-illustration from Kent State University, an MFA from Bard College-ICP, and a PhD in Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She is currently Documentarian in Community Co-Creation, facilitating the Co-Creation Initiative of the John B. Moore Documentary Studies Collaborative (MDOCS) at Skidmore College.
Artistic Statement
My artistic practice, incorporating writing, photography, audio, and video, is based in historical research and documentary practices. I investigate objects, documents, symbols, and testimony, both current and from archives, to explore the present (and future) in relationship to our connection(s) with the past, memory, and history. I am interested in what is said and what is left out: how silence shapes narrative. My work gravitates towards the space of current and past socio-political movements. In the context of history and memory, I examine the ways we attempt to draft ourselves (personally and collectively)—consciously and unconsciously—through our actions and proclamations.
While my work does not bear a methodological consistency, there are certain tendencies that I have learned to follow. Each work begins at the point of one object or collection of objects, a series of photographs, a cluster of symbols. Often (though not always) there is a personal aspect to the objects: a political button collection inherited from my father, a series of photographs taken my grandfather, a dusty relic found in the back of a closet. The space of familial inheritance and an examination of how ideas and ideologies are passed down are important to my process. Through researching around the objects, histories directly or tangentially related, my investigations take place at the intersection of private experience and public history. It is an examination of my (our) ‘I,’ Alexis Shotwell[1] writes, “as a collective situation experienced individually.”[1] Alexis Shotwell is professor of Sociology and Anthropology (with a cross-appointment in the department of Philosophy) at Carleton University. Her work examines epistemology, race, and gender.
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