Eye Lounge is pleased to present Beaver, an exhibition by artist Mikey Foster Estes. For his second solo exhibition at the gallery, Estes presents new photographic works alongside a selection of paintings and works on paper created by the artist’s late father, Beaver, from whom the exhibition takes its title. The exhibition also includes a collaborative video work from 2013 in which the artist, donning red high heels, builds a piece of furniture with his father in the garage.
The family home figures as a central focal point in Afterimages, a series of digital photographs and personal note entries made between November 2019 and April 2021. The images, made in various areas throughout the house, document its contents while also depicting the artist’s own experience with loss. In studying the house itself, he continues to consider the idea of the portrait as an absence.
Detail from Afterimages, 2021, digital c-print, dimensions variable
This selection of images highlight in part some of the house’s idiosyncrasies, many of which were implemented by Beaver himself: stained glass windows, hand-painted wall designs, mosaics, and more. Most recently he had started to make paintings, a practice in which he was active up until his death in July 2020. Beaver’s Show displays an accumulation of his self-taught oeuvre, in which landscape and natural imagery figure prominently.
Two works from Stray Cats, a series of messily-rendered watercolors produced by the artist in 2012, are installed directly across from a similar variation created by Beaver in the years after. This mirroring is repeated in Daddy’s Boy, a split screen video that follows father and son as they each build a side of a small wooden stand. The action is playfully subverted by the introduction of high heel shoes, a gesture drawing contrast to gendered expectations of masculine identities. Both sides of the stand are assembled and finished differently, and the video concludes with the image of the two halves coming together.
Still from Daddy’s Boy, 2013, single-channel video with sound, 4:53 min.
Beaver is on view at eye lounge from April 16 to May 9, 2021. Gallery hours are Saturday, 1—5pm and Sunday, 11—3pm. Entrance through MADE next door available Monday—Friday, 12—6pm. Face coverings and social distancing are required in the gallery at all times.
Mikey Foster Estes (b. 1991, Park Ridge, IL) is an artist whose practice is rooted in the everyday and spans performance, photography, sculpture, video, and writing. In addition to exhibiting locally, his work has been included in exhibitions in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. In 2020, he developed “Living Room,” a live-streamed performance for a series developed by nueBOX. His video, “Private Rainbows,” will be included in an upcoming exhibition this fall at Tempe Center for the Arts. In 2016, he attended the SOMA Summer international residency program in Mexico City. He holds an MFA from Hunter College, City University of New York, and a BFA from Arizona State University. He lives and works in Tempe, AZ.