Between Reach and Grasp: A Portfolio of New Photographs by Steven Beckly

I visited Steven Beckly’s Toronto studio the coldest day in January. The sun was bright and beaming but the air was still and frigid. One would never guess from the beautiful blue sky that the ground was frozen solid and fingers, even with gloves on, would burn with frostbite. Although the beauty of the day was negated by the sharp sting of winter’s touch, the sun gave me a much-needed healthy dose of ultraviolet B. During our studio visit, Steven brought up Anne Carson’s description of love, that love is like having an ice cube in your palm — the paradoxical sensation that oscillates between freezing cold and burning hot.

Steven Beckly blurs the boundaries between places, materials, and feelings; living within both the digital realm and natural world, tropical foliage scratching against steamy glass, a neon lycra swimsuit brushing against the dewy leaves of an ancient palm, a wilting flower’s petals neatly arranged in geometric patterns. Beckly’s photographs are captivating because they balance the sublimity of nature with the painful deficiency of the human condition. This balance, and subsequent tension, emulates the paradoxes of Eros. Where we find love, we also find pleasure and euphoria struggling against heartache and disillusionment. Beckly’s new work is a guided conversation about the love and intimacy between partners, friends and family.

Eros is an issue of boundaries. He exists because certain boundaries do. In the interval between reach and grasp, between glance and counterglance, between ‘I love you’ and ‘I love you too,’ the absent presence of desire comes alive. But the boundaries of time and glance and I love you are only aftershocks of the main, inevitable boundary that creates Eros: the boundary of flesh and self between you and me. And it is only, suddenly, at the moment when I would dissolve that boundary, I realize I never can.

Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay, 1986

Steven Beckly believes in love with a capital L.

Steven Beckly (b. 1981) is a Chinese-born artist and photographer who lives and works in Toronto, ON. He holds an MFA from the University of Guelph (2016) and is currently represented by Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto. Recent exhibitions and public installations include A tender touch can bend the straightest of things at Eastern Edge Gallery, Meirenyu at Daniel Faria Gallery, 2017 VICE Photo Show at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, The force of what lives us outliving the mountain at YU PHOTO, CONTACT Photography Festival, and the City of Toronto’s Jack Layton Ferry Terminal (2017).

This article is published in issue 36.1 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue