Since the mid-1970s, Ericka Beckman (b. 1951, Hampstead, NY) has forged a signature visual language in film, video, installation, and photography. Often shot against black, spatially ambiguous backdrops, her moving image works are structured according to the logic of child's play, games, folklore, or fairy tales, and populated by archetypical characters and toy-like props in bright, primary colours. Throughout her work, Beckman engages profound questions of gender, role-playing, competition, power and control. The publication will include selected works spanning thirty years of Beckman's career, providing the first opportunity to survey her contribution to the art world. With new scholarly essays on Beckman's work that offer an art-historical consideration of her early Super-8 Films and a critical situating of the artist's ongoing preoccupation with the structures of games, gambling, and capitalism, the exhibition catalogue contextualizes Beckman's practice on the occasion of this major survey exhibition. More than 20 colour images in the catalogue include photo- documentation of Beckman's works since 1983 and installation views of the MIT List Center exhibition.

Before Projection: Video Sculpture 1974 - 1995 shines a spotlight on a body of work in the history of video art that has been largely overlooked since its inception. Exploring the connections between our current moment and t he point at which video art was transformed dramatically with the entry of large - scale, cinematic installation into the gallery space . It presents a tightly focused survey of monitor - based sculpture made since the mid - 1970s. The exhibition catalogue focuses on the period after very early experimentation in video and before video art's full institutional arrival - coinciding with the wide availability of video projection equipment - in the gallery and museum alongside painting and sculpture. Proposing to e xamine what aesthetic claims these works might make in their own right, the exhibition aims to resituate monitor sculpture more fully into the narrative between early video and projection as well as assert its relevance for the development of sculpture ove r the course of the 1980s in general.