Robert Buck, "Wound Filler"

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October 28th - December 3rd, 2022
Washington DC: von ammon co is pleased to announce Wound Filler, a solo exhibition by Robert Buck. Wound Filler is the twentieth exhibition at the gallery’s current location, and Buck’s first appearance with the gallery. Arranged in the main arcades of the gallery are six (or seven) gunshots at close range, captured within cylinders of wound filler modeling compound. Wound filler, a sort of shorthand for human flesh, is a material used in the reconstruction phase of human embalming. The material is manufactured by the Dodge Chemical Company, the world’s largest supplier of embalming chemicals, tools, instruments, urns, and the many other products used in the funeral industry—also, as a grim suggestion of vertical integration, one of the prime distributors of crime scene forensic supplies worldwide. Between the years of 2004 and 2005, Robert Beck (as he was then named) purchased a range of tints of the product (crimsons, pinks, buffs and tans—the morbid spectrum provided by the human cadaver)  and fired a Winchester Super-X 12 gauge rifled hollow-point slug from a Daly brand Over/Under shotgun into the top of the round bucket’s contents of wound filler at point-blank range. The moment of the slug’s entry into the material is captured somewhat flawlessly on the top surface of the wax cylinder, forming a corona that evokes not only a ballistic impact but something as gentle as a raindrop landing on water. Each frozen wound sits upon its container, a polyvinyl carbonate bucket, sometimes sporting the Dodge Chemical Company’s product identification label.  Made over fifteen years ago, the Wound Filler works possess a constantly renewing elegiac nature, reflecting each new mass shooting upon their inert surfaces. The material language of embalming wax represents an unsullied, innocent human body—that which is meant to fill voids in destroyed flesh, a method of mortal redress. Each work captures the extent—and limits—of a 12 gauge slug’s destructive path through a perfect body, by committing the act upon the flawless inverse of the human form. Each wound filler sits upon its container, the Dodge Chemical bucket, which reinforces its presence as a fully balanced, unified body without organs. As a specimen of history, each work sits within a sealed vitrine, and thus makes no contact with its environment. Wound Filler is, at first, an encounter with the ubiquitous but alien (to many) despair of an innocent life extinguished by a firearm; it is, subsequently, a meditation on the force and direction of America’s most loathed and celebrated implement of death and injury.  In the rear alcove of the gallery, a candle made of wound filler sits alone. Casted as a positive of the void left from one of Beck’s close range shots, it could represent the incubus who haunts the sleeping body in the nation’s nightmare of violence; it could also beckon to be lighted, so as to grant a wish for the dream’s end.  Robert Beck was born in 1958 in Baltimore and moved to New York City in 1978 to learn filmmaking and cinema studies at New York University. In 1993, he attended the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art. He is a cross-disciplinary artist recognized for his precise use of materials, ranging from traditional art supplies to such non-art materials as mortician’s wax, industrial reflective paint, latent fingerprint powder and gunpowder. Trained as a filmmaker, he works in a montage-like or metonymical manner, a ‘horizontal’ approach that allows him to utilize the associative power of adjacent images and artworks. The crux of his art is subjectivity or self. Masculinity, violence, sexuality, loss and America are recurring themes. In 1995, Beck was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, in Printmaking/Drawing/Artists’ Books, as well as an Art Matters, Inc. grant. He received a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award in 1999. In 2007, Beck had a solo exhibition at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, OH. In 2008, Beck changed his given, or father’s, name as a work of art by a single vowel to Buck. In 2009, he bought a small off-grid property along the U.S.-Mexico border south of Marfa, Texas, where he finds inspiration. Buck’s practice is oriented by a constellation of influences, including artists Marcel Duchamp, Cy Twombly, Agnes Martin, Bruce Nauman and Cady Noland, filmmakers Robert Bresson and David Lynch, novelist Cormac McCarthy, forensic science, the American southwest and the teachings of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Since 2018, he has been an art editor of The Lacanian Review. His work is included in museum and private collections internationally. His moving image works are distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix, New York. He is represented in New York by Ulterior Gallery. In 2019, Buck received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award. Buck lives and works in New York City and far West Texas. 
WORKS
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DOCUMENTS
INSTALLATION VIEWS


Untitled work
1311957
 
Untitled work
1312253
 
Untitled work
1311955
 
Untitled work
1312244
 
Untitled work
1311950
 
Untitled work
1311948
 
Untitled work
1312235
 
Untitled work
1311956
 
Untitled work
1311949
 
Untitled work
1312246
 
Untitled work
1312245
 
Untitled work
1312237
 
Untitled work
1312240
 
Untitled work
1312251
 
Untitled work
1312228
 
Untitled work
1312255
 
Untitled work
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Untitled work
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Untitled work
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6/19/05 - Shot No. 11 (Daly Over/Under at Close Range with .12 Gauge Hollow Point Slug)
1308465
Robert Beck
6/19/05 - Shot No. 11 (Daly Over/Under at Close Range with .12 Gauge Hollow Point Slug), 2006
Wound filler, plastic, metal and paper
22 x 12 x 12 inches
RB.2006.42
 
3/26/04 - Shot no. 9 (Daly Over/Under at Close Range with .12 Gauge Hollow Point Slug)
1307846
Robert Beck
3/26/04 - Shot no. 9 (Daly Over/Under at Close Range with .12 Gauge Hollow Point Slug), 2004
Wound filler, plastic, metal, and paper
22 x 12 x 12 inches
RB.2004.54
 
6/19/05 - Shot No. 1 (Daly Over/Under at Close Range with .12 Gauge Hollow Point Slug)
1308562
Robert Beck
6/19/05 - Shot No. 1 (Daly Over/Under at Close Range with .12 Gauge Hollow Point Slug), 2006
Wound filler, plastic, metal and paper
22 x 12 x 12 inches
RB.2006.45
 
6/19/05 - Shot no.14 (Daly Over/Under at Close Range with .12 Gauge Hollow Point Slug)
1308501
Robert Beck
6/19/05 - Shot no.14 (Daly Over/Under at Close Range with .12 Gauge Hollow Point Slug), 2005
Wound filler, plastic, metal and paper
22 x 12 x 12 inches
RB.2005.62
 
Untitled (The Evidence of Proof)
1308563
Robert Beck
Untitled (The Evidence of Proof), 2005
Wound filler, plastic, metal and paper
33 x 12 x 12 inches
RB.2005.59
 
6/19/05 - Shot no.12 (Daly Over/Under at Close Range with .12 Gauge Hollow Point Slug)
1308528
Robert Beck
6/19/05 - Shot no.12 (Daly Over/Under at Close Range with .12 Gauge Hollow Point Slug), 2005
Wound filler, plastic, metal, and paper
22 x 12 x 12 inches
RB.2005.61
 
6/19/05 - Shot No. 15 (Daly Over/Under at Close Range with .12 Gauge Hollow Point Slug)
1308560
Robert Beck
6/19/05 - Shot No. 15 (Daly Over/Under at Close Range with .12 Gauge Hollow Point Slug), 2005
Wound filler, metal and paper
20 x 12.5 x 12.5 inches
RB.2005.60
 
The Light (Flesh)
1308819
Robert Beck
The Light (Flesh), 2006
Wound filler, wood, plexiglass, metal and wick
11 1/2 x 11 1/2 x 13 inches
RB.2006.01
 
Untitled (12-Gauge “Punkin' ball” at Close Range)
1311158
Robert Beck
Untitled (12-Gauge “Punkin' ball” at Close Range), 1999
gunpowder and drawing pad
24 x 18 inches
RB.1999.77
 
Wound Filler, Press Release
1311959
Wound Filler, Press Release
RB_WAPO_REVIEW.pdf
1324443
RB_WAPO_REVIEW.pdf
ROBERT BUCK.pdf
1396774
ROBERT BUCK.pdf
von ammon co

Robert Buck, "Wound Filler"

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