Steven Beckly

“Meirenyu,” the title of Steven Beckly’s first solo exhibition at the Daniel Faria Gallery in Toronto, is a transliteration for the word “mermaid” in Mandarin. Like the sirens in Homer’s Odyssey, mermaids are mythic creatures by turns beautiful, seductive and dangerous. Half-human, half-fish, majestically perched on land and plumbing mysterious, oceanic depths, mermaids are above all hybrids, but hybrids with magical powers. Steven Beckly’s delicate constructions, fashioned from everything from colour transparencies to sea urchin pins, explore the mythology of mermaids as a way of thinking about our fraught and mesmerized relationship to the sea. Perhaps, standing in front of the undulating blues of the sea, its alluring and frightening power, we all long to be mermaids.

Beckly’s art walks a fine line between the reflective, the resplendent and the jewel-like. The four parts of Blue Dancers, 2017–18, for instance, consist of coiled sheets of colour transparencies suspended by a silver chain from the ceiling. The transparencies are striped with soft, blurry mauve and blue, and stippled with bright spots. Looked at from below, they are like elegant vortexes, funnels pulling the sky downward. One of the dancers in Blue Dancers is surely the viewer. Slightly disoriented, looking up through their sensuous curves, you are drawn to move to the rhythm of the piece’s curves. Blue Dancers is less an exploration of myth than it is an evocation of the cosmos, and if a mermaid is involved, it is the viewer.

Like Blue Dancers, Untitled (O), 2017, and Pool of Andromeda, 2017–18, adopt philosophical themes, using the sea as a point of departure. Another colour transparency, Untitled (O) has an eye-shaped lens, shining, sparkling, set in stone. At first it looks like a smoothed depression in stone in an coastal outcrop of rock mirroring sunlight, then it looks like it might be a mysterious, refractive gem, and then it seems like it might be a rupture in the material world altogether, providing access to an underworld. Pool of Andromeda is equally indirect and allusive. Here, there is a vinyl photograph of a bowl with swirling water, a silver chain hanging down. For Beckly, the sky and its constellations and the world beneath the sensuous vortex of the sea mirror one another. But occasionally he descends from the cosmos to pieces that are purely lyrical and luxurious. Pearl Harvest, 2017, for instance, has a folded transparency covered with a soft, biomorphic blue and grey grid, a single pearl hanging from a chain in the middle. It suggests the perilous work of pearl divers descending to the sea floor for their strangely inscrutable and sublime harvest, their motions mermaid-like.

The work in “Meirenyu” often oscillates between the breathlessly meditative (Beckly’s work is never dark and broody, but always has a light-filled, whimsical feel) and the elegantly decorative. He does not, however, wholly ignore the flesh. Mermaids, after all, are a strange melding of different kinds of flesh. Under Six Feet Under, 2017, is a colour transparency with a blue grid and the shape of a finger, the piece affixed to the wall with a single pearlized pin. Trans Form, 2017, and Soft Tissue, 2017, are more sumptuous and fleshly. Trans Form is a folded and warped-out photograph in pink with the shape of a hand, flushed, blossoming, transforming. Soft Tissue is an inkjet on tissue with a torso, festooned with bursts of sea urchin spines and sequins. Sea Elegy, 2017–18, on the other hand, is surreal and a little morbid: a plaster leg sticks up from the ground, holding a folded photograph covered with cellular shapes. These are pieces that are not about mermaids and the myths they appear in, but about the body changing, transfiguring, beneath the sea. And as with all the pieces, the sea is a gateway into another world.

“Meirenyu” is a first exhibit by a young artist with a refined eye and a deft, subtle hand. Nonetheless, Beckly’s talent for the subtly luxurious (you want to wear all those beautiful pins) and his delicacy and lightness of touch often get in the way of a more forceful pursuit of a theme. The exhibit is really not about mermaids at all or their appearance in folk tales in China or anywhere else. It is about the frangibility of the body and its boundaries, about the infolding of the upper world of the sky and the world under water, and about the magical power and beauty of the world under the sea. As viewer, I wanted Beckly to pursue these themes with more resolute contrasts and bolder gestures. His work is at risk of being read as merely beautiful and alluring. But after I saw each piece a few times, giving it a little space, it is clearly much more than that. The sirens in Homer are both alluring and terrifying. Beckly needs to bring out a little more of the terror. ❚

“Meirenyu” was exhibited at Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto, from January 18 to February 24, 2018.

Daniel Baird is an American writer and editor, based in Toronto. He was one of the founders of The Brooklyn Rail and has written on art, culture and ideas for a variety of publications.