Jeremy Beaudry / projects and texts

About

My art practice engages the places I inhabit and traverse through research, projects, collaborations, activism, and teaching. I interrogate the official and unofficial histories, social and political relationships, and spatial practices that are embedded in the constructed meaning of a place. Fundamental to my investigations is an evolving, long-term fascination with memory as a force that establishes my (our) connection to places, particularly urban environments. In varying degrees, the subtext of my work has always been a search for how past experiences are contained and substantiated by architecture and the built environment; cultural and individual memory in architecture also seem to bind disparate experiences together in meaningful ways. While acknowledging the representation of memory as banal, nostalgic recollection, I am primarily concerned with memory and memorialization as a constructive process that acts as an agent of critical consciousness and dynamic (re)engagement with the world.

My practice, while rooted in the world and in specific localities, is equally invested in questions about the potential role citizen-artists fulfill in contemporary social and political life, and about the effectiveness and/or ineffectiveness of maintaining the highly contested artist/non-artist and art/non-art distinctions and oppositions. The consideration of such questions vis-à-vis art and activism has increasingly motivated me to view collaboration across disciplines and fields as a productive mode of working, especially within the context of the urban environment. Consequently, much of my work is encompassed within the Think Tank that has yet to be named, a collaborative group that initiates site-specific conversations, performative actions, and educational projects in order to interrogate contemporary urban issues in the places where we encounter them.

I am Jeremy Beaudry and I live in the wonderfully dysfunctional city of Philadelphia, where I am an Assistant Professor in Multimedia at the University of the Arts.

Contact Me, If You Like at jeremy@boxwith.com