Kevin Beasley

In Kevin Beasley’s studio, the artist shreds garments, sound equipment, household furniture, and steel using an industrial wood chipper, reducing them to piles of tattered debris. The small, irregularly shaped remnants of this process reappeared in a new series of mixed-media artworks at Regen Projects, most notably in the freestanding three-panel screen Portal II (all works 2025), which was positioned at the entrance to the gallery and which set the tone for the rest of the exhibition. Approached from the front, its translucent surface displayed a constellation of scattered shreds derived from housedresses, a plastic bag, and a barber’s bib that came into clearer view from its verso, where frayed threads were more visibly exposed. As he had done in creating many of the works in the exhibition, Beasley took seemingly banal objects and rendered visible the layered histories concealed within them. 

To produce these artworks, Beasley dyed batches of polyurethane resin and poured them slowly into rectangular molds, achieving unpredictable chromatic results, all while powdering the viscous mixture with fragments of his own discarded artworks processed through the wood chipper. Synth III, for example, burst with celebratory tonalities, appearing similar to confetti thrown into the sky mid-parade. Suspended among swirls of cotton-candy yellow, electric blue, and pastel pink resin, are ribbons of shredded pillowcase, scraps of personal protective equipment (PPE) and cloudlike clusters of raw cotton. This last material was sourced from the artist’s native Virginia and was obviously chosen due to its fraught history as a product of the transatlantic slave trade. Its use here represented a continuation in Beasley’s exploration into the complexities of American history, evolving in his practice from photographic studies of the rural South to monumental sculptural form.

Titled according to variations of the word synth, eight wall-mounted slabs alluded to his parallel practice as a performer and sound artist, manipulating frequencies through analog synthesizers, much as he layers tangible material in the resin works. These towering, multicolored artworks enveloped the walls but emitted no audible noise. Yet, in works such as Synthesizer III, one could synesthetically sense the crushing sound of wooden furniture and a metal microphone stand being processed, their fragments now embedded in resin. In Synth XIV, motionless splashes of orange and green resin had dulled to brown, while in Synth XI, pulverized steel floated like synthetic hair trapped in frozen liquid, where Beasley encased children’s T-shirts that once belonged to his nieces within pools of cherry red, mint green, and orange resin. 

Facing these slabs was an arrangement of large, multipanel sculptural screens occupying the floor of the gallery. Their titles spoke of travel, though any sense of where the visitor would arrive remained unknown. Among them was the five-panel Let me know when you get there, in which stretched shawls, graphic T-shirts, bedsheets, and other less readily identifiable garments rested atop one another, their rippled folds sealed beneath a lustrous coat of translucent resin. Similarly, Portal (I’ll go if you go) and OMW consisted of four panels: one patterned with fence-like columns and the others topped with altered T-shirts, slit open and draped like laundry left to dry. Along the plywood edges and metal edges of each of these artworks, where metal hinges bind each panel, bits of exposed foam used to volumize the fabric protrude slightly, exposing the structure typically concealed beneath the surface in the other works on view. These subtle details, which demystify the illusion of a finished artwork devoid of the artist’s hand or decision-making, present a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the moment of their execution. 

The beginning of you and the end of me stood apart from every other work in the exhibition. From a clothing rack hung military uniforms, button-down shirts, and a pair of camouflage pants collapsing into pairs of laced-up boots. The garments point to the successive generations of Beasley’s family, who served across various branches of the military. Here, the artist reflects on his own family’s ties to, and the broader history of, Black veterans for whom military service once represented a pathway to citizenship and equal recognition. Each uniform, piece of furniture, microphone stand, and puff of cotton—all abstracted into sculpture within the exhibition—conveys stories concealed beneath the surface. They resurface faded, sometimes pleasant memories (or those one might not want to revisit) before the passage of time, like a shredder, inevitably fragments them into dust.