Edie Beaucage: All Over the Time
1110 Mateo St
Los Angeles, CA 90021
Self Portrait, if I Had Been Cool, 2022
Acrylic on canvas
84 x 60 in (213.4 x 152.4 cm)
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is very pleased to announce Edie Beaucage: All Over the Time, an exhibition of new paintings and sculptures, on view in Gallery 1 from March 11 – April 22, 2023. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, March 11 from 4 to 7 pm.
What is cool? It’s an attitude, social ease, confidence, openness, a sense of style... It’s a fearless flapper with a high-cropped bob, a surfer girl with beachy waves and an easy smile, a self-possessed Egyptian goddess with kohl-rimmed eyes, a Venice Beach barista with a long copper beard. It’s Jean Seberg in Breathless. Coolness reaches across time and place, glancing at its audience with an aloof and indefinable yet enviable expression.
Through a research-based praxis engaging art history and the everyday, collecting snapshots spanning centuries and cultures, Los Angeles-based artist Edie Beaucage engages in autofictive explorations. She redefines personal histories by creating iconic portraits at a larger-than-life scale that reimagine her Québécois family—her sister Dominique, her brother Michel, and herself—as hip SoCal teenagers with synthwave daydreams—a correction of an uncomfortable adolescence. Rendered with big, bold brushstrokes, Beaucage’s characters ooze effortless and effervescent cool. Her paintings plumb the past and present to convey whispers of truth, declarations of sincerity, and the invented authenticity of reimagined biographies.
Beaucage reinvents memories, imbuing them with the casual coolness she longed for as an awkward teen in her exploration of real and imagined identities. Working from an altermodern perspective, she interconnects cultures and disregards time. She erases her souvenir du Quebec by redrawing herself and her siblings into her current California life, crosspollinating and creating her own first-generation hybrid offshoots. In her paintings, Beaucage materializes les nouveaux Californiaquois heureux—the happy new Californians.
Edie Beaucage received her MFA from Otis College of Art and Design in 2010 and BA from Bishop’s University in Lennoxville, Quebec, Canada. She also studied at Palazzo Spinelli, Centro per L’arte e Il Restauro, Florence, Italy. Beaucage recently undertook residencies at the Royal College of Art in London, the Berlin Art Institute in Germany, and the School of Visual Arts in New York. She is cofounder and a member of the I Found U Collective. Edie was born in Quebec, Canada, and lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
Beaucage has presented solo exhibitions at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles; CB1 Gallery, Los Angeles, Creative Artists Agency, Los Angeles; Fox Theater and Orange Barrel Media, Hollywood; Bolsky Gallery at Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, and Office Space, Salt Lake City. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Satchel Projects, New York; Barac, Manheim, Germany; Kings College, Cambridge, UK; Armory Center for the Arts, Los Angeles; Chinese American Museum, Los Angeles; Piasa, Paris, France; Appeals Gallery, Amsterdam, NL; Woodbury University, Los Angeles; LAX Airport, and the Colburn Music School, Los Angeles, among others. She has been featured in numerous publications including The Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, KCRW DNA Radio, Artillery, Huffington Post, and Whitehot Magazine among others.