Walead Beshty is a very intelligent man. His work is based on political and social movements and the process through which he makes his art is very thoughtful.
Excerpt from an "about the artist" statement, "Walead Beshty has long used photography as a tool to explore the social and political conditions of our material culture. More recently, the material conditions of photography itself have spurred his continuing investigations of the gap between the physical world and the image world, and the way this rupture is instrumentalized by ideologies that seek to infiltrate the processes through which we produce meaning."
Beshty also makes large scale, abstract, color photograms. He combines elements of early photography, and then puts a modern spin on it by using large-scale digital printers, and color processing. Another innovative piece Beshty created is a set of shatter proof glass boxes that he ships from gallery to gallery in fed ex boxes. As the pieces move, they develop cracks and shatters from the wear and tear of the travel. This speaks to the movement, the physical tracing of the pieces as they move from show to show. At each location, the boxes take on a new visual element, from the shipping. This work speaks similarly to the photographs Beshty shoots of abandoned Iraqi government buildings in former East Berlin. He had been shooting the gradual decay of the buildings, when on a later trip, his film made it's way through the airport x-ray machines. Rather than dispose of the film, Beshty began shooting with it to make commentary on the travel and the change that had taken place within the space.
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