Ray Beldner: Counterfeit
Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco
May 2 - June 1, 2002
Catharine Clark Gallery presents Counterfeit a solo exhibition of work by Ray Beldner. In this recent work, Beldner has selected well-known 20th century artists, such as Marcel Duchamp, Georgia O’Keeffe, Rene Magritte and Andy Warhol, and re-made their most famous artworks with US paper currency. Each money piece--carefully and painstakingly fabricated by sewing together one dollar bills--mimics the original’s scale and dimensions. As the art critic Dave Hickey has written, art and money have no intrinsic value. When one buys a piece of art, they are simply trading “a piece of green paper, signed by a bureaucrat, for a piece of white paper with a picture on it, signed by an artist.” Art and money are cultural fictions, he asserts, acquiring exchange value through the trust that we personally and collectively place in them. By constructing art that plays at the nexus where notions of economics and culture collide, Ray Beldner plays with our assumptions about money, art, and their respective values.
The exhibition features 20 works, sculptural and two dimensional, as well as several works on paper that Ray Beldner has completed with Trillium Press. One of the most labor intensive and large scale works in the exhibit, a piece after Jackson Pollack, was created collaboratively between Beldner and Trillium Press and incorporates digital printing and sanded pigment from one dollar bills that has been adhered to the surface of the work.
RAY BELDNER
Ray Beldner is a San Francisco sculptor, installation, and public artist whose work has been exhibited in museum, non-profit and gallery venues since 1990. He was born in San Francisco and received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from Mills College in Oakland, California. He has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions both nationally and internationally and his work can be found in many public and private collections including the Oakland Museum, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the San Jose Museum of Art, the Hechinger Collection in Washington D.C., the di Rosa Preserve in Napa, California, the Federal Reserve Board, Washington D.C., and the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Arizona. Ray Beldner is a 1996 recipient of a California Arts Council Fellowship in New Genres, a 1997 recipient of a Creative Work Fund Grant from the Haas Foundations, and a 1999 recipient of a Potrero Nuevo environmental art grant. He has taught at the San Francisco Art Institute, the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, California, and the College of Notre Dame in Belmont, California. His work has been reviewed in publications including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Visions, Art Issues, Arte, and Artweek magazines. Rey Beldner’s work was included in Drip, Blow, Burn at the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, New York, Korean Sculpture/World Sculpture at the Moran Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea, and Money Making: The Fine Art of Currency, at the Federal Reserve Board, Washington D.C.
CATALOGUE
A sixteen-page catalogue printed in glorious green was published in conjunction with the exhibition, which originally opened in Santa Monica, California at the Frumkin/Duval Gallery in February 2001 and has since traveled to Cora Bettcher Gallery in Miami, FL. The accompanying catalogue essay is by Maria Porges.
CATHARINE CLARK GALLERY
49 Geary St. Floor 2, San Francisco, CA 94108
