Author: Adam Lehrer

Forbes, July 11, 2018

Artist Sue De Beer Makes Poetic Film Art In The Guise Of A Werewolf Movie At Marianne Boesky

Working at the intersection of film, photography and installation, artist Sue de Beer has always yielded suggestive narratives and evocations of time and memory in her work. At Marianne Boesky, de Beer has debuted her sixth film project. Entitled The White Wolf, de Beer’s film is in the guise of a classic low budget horror scenario: that of the werewolf. But, as is typical of de Beer’s work, it is able to create not just aesthetic beauty, but highly provocative ruminations on the havoc of time, sexuality, and the ways our psyches and physicalities come together to form us as human beings.

De Beer’s films, diverging from most of what we see in the context of gallery oriented video art and film, have similar impact as narrative art cinema. They are condensed, and more abstract in meaning and information to be sure, but I nevertheless am usually left with that all-encompassing pleasure that the films of David Lynch, Pier Paolo Pasolini, or David Cronenberg leave me with. Her films often inspire awe and wonder.

De Beer’s practice has evolved considerably from the beginning of her career. But her style and interests have held a remarkable coherence. There is the interest in the occult and mysticism that the artist views as her birthright having grown up in Salem, MA. There is the aesthetic connections to genre horror, particularly the lighting and color of Giallo thrillers pioneered by directors like Dario Argento and Mario Bava. De Beer often interacts with texts of noted transgressive writers and snippets of language written by Dennis Cooper, Bret Easton Ellis and Alissa Bennet have appeared in her work. And finally, De Beer’s work is admirably un-pretentious. Not only in the sorts of genres and conventions she brings into her work, but also in the very way that she creates the work itself. She is unafraid of incorporating new technology into the work.

You can see this aspect in her earliest work, the “horror” photographs that are being shown concurrently with The White Wolf, in which de Beer used crude but aesthetically potent digital edits to emphasize her images of eviscerated bodies. And you can see it in The White Wolf, a piece that saw de Beer turn to crowdsourcing website Kickstarter to get the project funded. De Beer’s openness to using aesthetics, genres, and methods outside the highfalutin art world’s established order has lent her work a sense of idiosyncratic vision.

The presentation of The White Wolf alongside’s de Beer’s horror photographs is an intriguing one, demonstrating de Beer’s adherence to certain genre tropes related to horror but how her work has nevertheless grown in sophistication and poetic impact. The photographs were shot in a neutral style that de Beer copped from looking at architectural and wedding photography, according to an interview with The Creative Independent. She used this direct photographic style to capture scenes of gore and graphic violence, in a sense breaking down and isolating singular conventions of classic ‘80s slasher films by the likes of Wes Craven and John Carpenter to still images of maximum impact. Conversely, The White Wolf uses a horror trope, the werewolf, but eschews scenes of violence or even showing us the werewolf in question, instead using the werewolf convention as an analytical lens into contemporary existence. In this sense, you can argue that de Beer was interested in breaking down the conventions of horror in earlier work while her recent installations and films use horror, and fantasy, to ask deeper questions about what it means to be human now.