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Robert Bean
Biography
Robert Bean is an artist, writer and teacher living in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Born and raised in Saskatchewan, he moved to Nova Scotia in 1976 to pursue a career in contemporary art and education. He obtained a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD University) in 1978, and an MA in Cultural Studies from the University of Leeds, England in 1999. He is currently an Associate Professor at NSCAD University. Bean has exhibited his work in solo and group exhibitions in Canada, the United States, Europe, South America and New Zealand.
Commissions include the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada and the Toronto Photographers Workshop (Gallery TPW). He has published articles on photography, art and culture, written catalogue essays and undertaken curatorial projects. Bean has served on peer review juries for the Canada Council for the Arts and has received grants and awards from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Bean's work is in public and private collections, including the Nova Scotia Art Bank, the Canada Council Art Bank, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia and the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography.
Robert Bean curated the video exhibition “Future Perfect” for the Centre for Art Tapes, Halifax in 2004. This exhibition featured the work of Stan Denniston, Johnnie Eisen and Kelly Richardson. Other curatorial projects included the exhibition “Historical Photographs from the Collection of the University College of Cape Breton” at the Anna Leonowens Art Gallery in Halifax, N.S. and the Art Gallery of the University of Cape Breton, Sydney, N.S.
Robert Bean had a solo exhibition of his photographic work “Lapsus” at the Dalhousie University Art Gallery in January 2005 and has recently published the audio work “Silenzio” in conjunction with the exhibition “Disquiet” at Modern Fuel Gallery, Kingston, Ontario. “Silenzio” is an audio work based on the aural sensations of the Sistine Chapel. Christof Migone is the curator of “Disquiet” and the distributor of “Silenzio”. Robert Bean’s solo exhibition “Verbatim” was exhibited at akau inc, Toronto Ontario, January 2006.
Robert Bean has recently edited a book of essays on Contemporary Canadian Photography for Gallery 44 in Toronto. The book “Image and Inscription: An anthology of Contemporary Canadian Photography” was published by Gallery 44 and the YYZ Press in November 2005.Description of Research
"Artifacts become knowable in part because they are enmeshed within the back and forth and round about of telling what they are, and because telling devolves upon discernable rhetorical conventions, like genres and specialized vocabularies, that are themselves largely the result of unconscious consensus."
- Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 7.
The sites and subjects that I explore consider the temporal uncertainty that photographs evoke in relation to memory, technology and experience. The exhibition "Verbatim" is comprised of digital images made with a flatbed scanner. The prints are "contact images" that remember and forget the earlier technological processes of photography and typewriting. Photography, typing, and phonographic writing (stenographer's shorthand) are all historically associated with the technologies of verbatim inscription. The history and memory of our embodied relationship to these technologies is essential to the human-computer interface of contemporary digital technologies. "Verbatim" reconsiders the development of language machines and the subsequent systems of storage and retrieval.
In 1997 I dismantled a manual typewriter. The physical contact with the object was used as a procedure for remembering an obsolete technology that has influenced and predated my experience. The cultural complexity of the apparatus, its design, function, and mechanical precision were conveyed through this process of disassembly. The labour that fabricated and implemented the writing machine was also revealed. Since that time, I have been reassembling the artifacts of this experience as digital images. The mechanical artifacts are texts and stories that may be transcribed and retold. As Lisa Gitelman has noted, "[n]ew inscriptions signal new subjectivities." - Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 11.
This project is an exploration of organic and inorganic memory through the borders and interface that continue to define the human experience with machines. As a child, I was fascinated with the beauty of the mechanical imprint produced by the typewriter. During the disassembly of the machine, the indexical traces of the type hammer were rediscovered as random letters inscribed into the typewriter ribbon.
As the unintended graffiti of a prior vocation, these marks register a presence and an absence. Like the machine that harbored them, they are passé. These ribbons became the source for two scrolls that recollect the embedded memory in the ribbon. The writing machines had a profound effect on the organization of institutions, labour and the accumulation and dissemination of knowledge. They were instrumental in redefining experience as pattern and information. Concurrently, the bureaucracies that utilized writing machines and reproductive technologies during the twentieth century enhanced the systemic efficiency of surveillance, accountability and archiving that have subsequently abridged many areas of human experience. The computer expands and supplements the legacy of this technology.
In this context, the works in "Verbatim" may provide an intriguing encounter with the subjective memory and oblivion that our relationship to technology evokes.