without a clear discernible image
Exhibition 6 February–30 April 2020
Installation photograph from the ‘without a clear discernible image’ exhibition in A4’s Gallery depicts a detail of Kevin Beasley’s untitled resin sculpture constituted from “aid-to-trade” garments, house dresses, a handbag and an umbrella.
Artwork detail: Kevin Beasley, Untitled (2020). ‘Aid-to-trade’ garments, housedresses, handbag, umbrella, resin. 152 x 86 x 79 cm. Courtesy of private collection.
Title without a clear discernible image Dates 6 February–30 April 2020 Location Gallery Tagline A solo exhibition by Kevin Beasley, produced on site at A4. Credits

Studio Assistant:
Shani Strand

Photo/video documentation &
exhibition installation:
Kyle Morland

Print media:
Ben Johnson

Special thanks to Casey Kaplan, Veronica Levitt, and Katherine Brinson.

For the month leading up to the exhibition without a clear discernible image, Kevin Beasley converts A4's Gallery into his studio.

The exhibition is a composition of “[F]ragments, quotations, samples – these are the parts that make the whole. A basketball, a moon boot, dried flowers, a fishing net, a skirt," writes Lucienne Bestall. "Beasley is preoccupied, above all, with provenance, with the inheritance of found objects, scenes and sounds" (Bestall, 2020). 

The found objects carry the traces of their inhabitants. Sean O'Toole writes of the "scavenger's hauls" that, together with resin, form the material of Beasley's sculptures and assemblages. The exhibition "subtly reframes the history and politics of cotton...to address a local economic truth: Africa is a net exporter of cotton but a net importer of textiles and clothing, most notoriously of Western cast-offs" (O'Toole, 2020).

The exhibition features new sculpture, works on paper, landscape photographs and an audio installation, for which the show is named. This is Beasley's first exhibition on the continent.

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Kevin Beasley was born in 1985 in Lynchburg, Virginia, and lives in Harlem, New York. He earned his BFA from the College for Creative Studies in Detroit in 2007, and his MFA from Yale University in 2012.

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