A Southern California native, Josh Beckman attended UC Santa Barbara where he participated in the Honors Studio program & received his B.A. with an emphasis in painting & sculpture. Fascinated by the inherent narrative of landscape – the textures, space & variation of the Pacific & Southwest have long been an inspiration & influence in Josh’s work which often aims to capture moments just either side the fulcrum of turbulent events.

With an interest in materials & the process of fabrication he has always sought the hands-on environment. Over the years this has led to the development of a particular skill-set by way of fabricating for artists, building furniture, working at Hasting’s Plastics, Merv Griffin Studios & a toy prototyping company, by designing & constructing sets & props for films, events & a carnival company, collaborating with his wife’s floral studio, through exploration on his own projects, & culminating with his job as an exhibit designer.

He has worked at the Los Angeles Natural History Museum for nearly a decade in varying fabrication & design capacities on numerous temporary & permanent exhibits, and is currently working on a new long-term exhibit about the history of Los Angeles.

Josh has shown his own installation work at High Desert Test Sites, Furthermore Gallery, Mario’s Furniture, and Machine Project. He is currently exploring the ceramic medium and remodeling his kitchen.

To prepare for Josh’s visit:

Watch Gaspar Noe’s  “Enter The Void.” There’s a BluRay copy in the CalArts AudioVisual library or available on Instant Queue from Netflix. The abstract for the film from the CalArts library: “A brother and sister are trapped in the hellish night time world of Tokyo, where he deals drugs and she works as a stripper. A crime gone bad leads to shocking violence and then moments of transcendence in which the movie plunges viewers into death and rebirth like no film has ever done before.”

This feature film is 143 minutes long, so maybe one of you wants to arrange a group viewing for the class and anyone else whose interested.

As a side note, design critic Rick Poynor found the titles for this film so interesting that he wrote about them for Eye magazine: “Critique: A soul adrift in neon limbo: The credits of Gaspar Noé’s Enter The Void suck the viewer into an immersive maelstrom of lettering.”Be sure to also note the link to the heart-stopping film titles at the bottom of the posting or you can view them here.