Edith Beaucage @ VOLTA New York, Booth B8, Pier 90

Edith Beaucage's paintings invite us to follow a young swashbuckler couple in a topside adventure. Petula is a sailor who sold all of her belongings and now navigates the big salty. Her sea legs took her to the South Pacific. A femme of high spirits, she enjoys great conversations with aged tequila in her sailboat boudoir. She loves to be top free on the island, surrounding herself with quiet plants. She spends most of her time talking with her lover and shipmate, a philosopher from Denmark named Gudbjorn. "Gud" loves cutting wood, making wood ornaments and thinking about how the world's population is exponentially growing. What will happen to the food production in Micronesia, he wonders? Every afternoon Petula swims. Gud takes pictures of Petula day and night. They plumb the depths together.

In parallel to Roland Barthes' essay S/Z and his search for openness of interpretation in literature, Edith Beaucage organized her current body of work, Skipper, to allow for a flexible narrative, creating a series of paintings that straddle representation and abstraction and mixes the "plot" in a non-linear fashion. While initial sketches help to unfold the narrative, the characters and situation determine how the individual environment is depicted in each painting. The viewer will discover the paintings by looking through freestanding sculptural elements that produce a deep focus space similar in effect to a depth of field composition in cinematography, allowing them to focus on both close and distant planes.

Edith Beaucage lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her MFA from Otis College of Art and Design in 2010 and BA from Bishop's University in Lennoxville, Quebec, Canada, with additional studies at Palazzo Spinelli, Centro per L'arte e Il Restauro, Florence, Italy. Edith's work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions in the U.S. and is included in numerous private collections, including the celebrated Creative Artists Agency in Los Angeles.