Opening Reception: Beedallo: Ditchwater

Beedallo: Ditchwater
opening reception: Thursday, June 27, 5-8 pm
on view: June 27–August 4, 2024

With part of the artist’s childhood lived on the barren east mesa of Valencia County, there is a reluctant nostalgia for the vast illegal dumping grounds found in the deserts of New Mexico. The endless sprawl of tires, furniture, newspaper stacks, and the occasional animal carcass or dry rotted jacuzzi were preferable to the flat bulldozed pad of sand prepped for development that replaced them in some areas. The irrigation ditches in the valley below offered the opposite experience. When they were full of water and life, they were conventionally beautiful. The older generations claimed to have swam in them, but warned us not to. We were told the discarded was hidden under the murk. Tales of glass and barbed wire kept us from the water during the day, and stories about ghosts discouraged us from the pitch black ditch banks at night. The ditches were safest in the winter, when the water was gone or close to it, and the discarded was fully visible. The artist has been conditioned to feel comfort in the discarded.

Beedallo grew up in Los Chavez, a small strip of farmland in Valencia County, New Mexico. Much of her work is an attempt to combine her love of cartooning with traditional folk art and imagery passed down from her family to express conflicted and often surreal experiences with the land, family, and tradition. She is currently based out of Albuquerque, New Mexico and shows in several galleries in the area. Her work has been featured both nationally and internationally as album art for the American synth-pop band, Future Islands, the Australian experimental noise band, Pleasure, and the Italian punk band, The Whistling heads. Her work has also appeared in promotional material for Apple.