Before Tampa artist Bekky Beukes installed her latest show debris at the Blue Goose, she invited a few people to her Ybor studio to view the detailed paintings of birds and snakes — and her intense study of her failures and triumphs. It's a shame these paintings can't be viewed so intimately by everyone, in Beukkes' compact brick studio, with her explaining which part of her soul she bled into each.
These paintings represent what's left as and after she endures each stage of a repeating cycle of destruction and rebirth (and the battles between those points). They also offer a poignant, wrenching acknowledgement: Her spirit is a battlefield.
Each work offers a biblical/mythological perspective of that battlefield, unique to Beukkes, but also incredibly empathetic to each viewer's internal combats. Even the triumph at the end isn't a resolution, she says, it's a step, because she knows she'll go through it all again.
My favorite piece plays off the parable of two wolves — the idea that two wolves live inside us all, and these wolves fight: One wants to take our soul to dark places and one wants bring it to the light, and whichever one we feed is the one that will win. The parable's origin is highly debated, the but sentiment is no less true, illustrated here with two birds at war over her.
There's a phoenix, and there's poison, and there's treasure. There's more — but you need to see this, and, if possible, you need to see this with Beukes there on Saturday, Aug. 5 — opening night. The six works — and a study — will take you up and down, a reminder, Beukkes tells me, that "shit's gonna change pretty soon."
She means, of course, in her own life, but this applies to us all. debris shows how she's learned to live with the flux.
"The dark storms actually present something valuable," she says, because they do lead to treasure.
She just has no clue what that treasure is until those storms pass.
Cathy Salustri is the A+E editor at CL Tampa Bay. Contact her here.
This article appears in Aug 3-10, 2017.