Info

Leah Beeferman works with digital image-making, video, text, and sound. Her work explores and abstracts the shifting relationships between measurement and uncertainty as they relate to landscape and weather at a variety of scales.

She has had solo exhibitions at the Penumbra Foundation, New York; Peeler Art Center, Indiana; Rawson Projects, New York; Sorbus, Helsinki; CO-OPt, Texas; and Arcade on Stadium, Utah. Recent two-person or group exhibitions include Helsinki Art Museum, Finland; Smack Mellon, Brooklyn; Fiskars Village Biennial, Finland; Sirius Arts Centre, Ireland; SOLU, Helsinki; The Anderson, Richmond.

Beeferman has participated in many residencies including LMCC Workspace, New York; The Arctic Circle, Svalbard; Tiputini Biodiversity Research Station, Ecuador; Climate Whirl/Hyytiälä Forest Research Station, Finland; ArsBioarctica, Finland; Mustarinda, Finland; Digital Painting Atelier, OCAD, Toronto; and Sirius, Ireland. Her work has been discussed in publications such as BOMB, Objektiv, Temporary Art Review, Art in Print, Rhizome, and ArtPulse. She has written artist texts for PUBLIC Journal, Contemporary Art Stavanger, and Taupe Magazine. In 2022, Rooftop Press (Helsinki) published a written conversation between Beeferman and artist Tuukka Kaila: If you show me what you know, can I tell you what I see? In 2016 she published Triple Point, an artist book, with Lodret Vandret (Copenhagen).

Beeferman received an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University (2010) and a BA from Brown University (2004) and was the recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Grant to Finland (2016-17). Beeferman is now based in Providence, where she teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design and Brown University.

Statement

I make digital images, prints, objects, and videos, record sound, and write texts. I want to understand the atmosphere and its movements, calculations, and shapes: the ways it makes weather forms, forms landscapes, and alters them. I flatten the weather, frame it, give it edges. Though of course it is not possible to truly flatten the weather, to compress its four dimensions of dynamics into two. Only in images does the weather slow to a stop, collapse to a plane. So I look closely, through the confines of devices that make images: at landscape locations, uncertain clouds, changes in time, ambient data.

I use a camera to record what I see. I take pictures of these landscape elements: clouds, forests, deserts, leaves, rocks, water, and draw gestures, utterances, which flatten, punctuate, and abstract them. I gather images from scientific sources: satellites, cielometers, national weather services, hyper-local experiments, publicly-accessible measurements. These depthless pictures of landscape and weather are my materials. I group and layer them. Moments — momentary states of change — fold together outside of their time-based systems. Instants seen from one angle and many angles, from without or within, edged, converging, compressing time and landscape. They regain a depth that is dense, yet flat: forms of the world amassed to single surfaces.

Scientists build tools to make the invisible visible, to pause what passes, to calculate what arrives. I read about this science and its tools. I borrow its terms for my texts and mix them with words that make them wider, outward-looking. I take its images and combine them with my own to reflect on what I learn and see: cloud-scale uncertainties, passing atmospheres, graphs as narratives, events in time, environmental fluctuations, winds, variables, variations, earthly movements and motions. And I feel, through these images, some understanding of planetary scale.