Pamela Beck
Pamela Beck is an abstract photographer who has exhibited extensively in California, particularly in the Los Angeles area. Recent solo exhibitions include features at Gallery 825 and The Space at Icon in Los Angeles, and Melissa Morgan Fine Art in Palm Desert. Group shows include numerous showings at Gallery 825 as well as Garel Fine Art in Manhattan Beach, Las Laguna Gallery in Laguna Beach, Dorado 806 projects in Los Angeles, and Burke Trilio Studio in Pasadena. Pamela has won a first place award with the Los Angeles Center for Photography and has been published in several exhibition catalogues by Los Angeles Art Association and Melissa Morgan Fine Art.
A majority of the photographs are taken in Pamela’s studio and are cropped images of various surfaces of fabrics, fauna, and sticks. Other photos contain close ups of several landscape types such as crashing ocean waves, the open sky, and palm trees. As a former writer and dancer, these compositions express a sense of movement in textural composition while revealing a narrative about the purpose and mystery of abstraction. Some of Pamela’s surfaces are so ambiguous and abstract, they may come across as digital alterations, when in fact they are not.
The most interesting photographs from Pamela’s portfolio tend to be her fluorescent flowers, images of various forms of water, and carefully placed folds of fabric against a white or black background. These textile materials come across with similar appearance to a painting but with much more precision and precise linearity shaping the form. In terms of representing aqua, Pamela tends to focus on the natural hydraulics of pressurized water, either naturally in the ocean or induced in her studio. These particular compositional pools express notions of motion, consistent coloring, and trance-inducing qualities. Pamela’s photographs depicting fluorescent flowers are few in number but equally as striking as her boldest pieces. The glowing flowers invoke hallucinogenic qualities and are reminiscent of fantastical landscapes found in the novels of Jules Verne.
Ghost Buds (pictured above) remains one of the few fluorescent roses captured in the Flower Power series. Such a particular piece remains notable because of the motion of the light enveloping the structures of the roses, surrounded by vast portions of black negative space. The variation in blues and whites creates distinct optical distortions based in both abstraction and fleeting moments of time. A carefully constructed composition, Ghost Buds could be described as one of Pamela’s finest works because of the sense of minimal and fantastical implications and associations with mystical illusions.
Pamela Beck redefines the purpose of abstraction through photography, capturing texture to mold a sense of controlled form. Her works invoke imaginative and illusory notions of flashing memories and distant motion through contortions of surface and smearing of color. She advances abstract art beyond the surface of the canvas and into realms of unseen territory, very much treating her art studio like the laboratory of an imaginative and perhaps even mad scientist. Her alchemical-like creations of fusing light with form and texture create fantastical environments rich in exploration and imagination.
