Daniel Faria Gallery, CONTACT Photography Festival, Toronto
May 1, 2025 – June 14, 2025
Steven Beckly’s photographs have long performed the delicious magic trick of illustrating the inherent contradictions within our personal and romantic relationships. Now with his third solo exhibition at Daniel Faria Gallery, which opened in early May as a Core Exhibition within the CONTACT Photography Festival, the photographer and Format member shifts focus to the legacies of wartime ephemera and familial bonds between a father and son.
Chain of Command, 2025. Archival pigment print. 20⅝ x 25⅝ inches (framed). Photo: LF Documentation
The exhibition titled ‘Handy Work’ illustrates an unexpected material turn for Beckly; Walking into the gallery space I was met with large-scale photographs, presented in confident dark frames. The images strike a gentle balance between connection and distance, youth and the quiet of aging. The elements of his previous work; intricate chains, decorated seashells, embellished pins and plaster-cast limbs are noticeably pared down in this iteration. These objects now rendered in 2-dimension photographs, are still imbued with tenderness, heartache and immense joy, in their role as props within a theatrical dance of hands; Beckly and his father’s.
There’s a clear evolution of these adorned objects, as here they are transformed into wearable pieces of jewelry inlaid with imperial jade or gemstones, but still bearing traces of their history as they are made using vestiges of war including bullet casings and shields. So begins the meaningful material play Beckly engages with as jade rings and bangles are often depicted as amulets; a sign of protection and good fortune not to be removed.
Themes of protection are again evoked by metal rings 3D printed in brass, replicating casings and bullets that Beckly’s father often handled when he was a weapons technician in the Canadian military. The rings are now seen as a complicated symbol of unity, connection, or an unending promise while ironically using the archetypal shapes of violence and war.
The metals themselves are a warm brass often stamped with naturalistic forms like the glinting surface of a lake or the imprinted veins of a leaf, but also patterns of significance to Beckly, like his father’s military number. As seen in the photograph titled ‘62156227’, the contrast of these numbers on a ring against Beckly’s own tattooed skin is haunting, echoing a familial love across materials and body. It is no wonder why his work focuses so much on the body, skin and the expressiveness of hands because of the potential for intimacy, misdirection and awe. The joining of hands, the finger play, pinky swears and thumb wars all illustrate the complexities of our internal conflicts and personal relationships.
LEFT: False Idols, 2025. Archival pigment print on coated glassine. 24 x 19⅛ inches (framed). Photo: LF DocumentationRIGHT: Perfect Foil, 2025. Archival pigment print on tissue paper embedded with gold flecks. 24 x 19⅛ inches (framed). Photo: LF Documentation
False Idols points to another complex relationship between surface and image; printing on glassine, a material used primarily in archiving to protect photographs from scratches, humidity and outside elements; beauty, fragility and surprising longevity become a foundation for the image. The moisture of the ink has warped and wrinkled the glassine, transforming it into aging skin, sagging and wrinkled, it speaks of time and experience. Gold flakes embedded in the thin paper surface in Perfect Foil become sun spots, moles and the marks of a life lived.
These two pieces, the only ones framed in white, feel like counterbalances to the solitary still life scenes where no figures appear in frame. In stark contrast are the militaristic props and backgrounds that Beckly weaves throughout the exhibition narrative; various kinds of netting, camouflage fabrics and sniper veils drape over the backgrounds and foregrounds of the images. The deep ochres, peaches and earth tones associated with hunting and tactical gear are queered to become the black or blue velvet seen in traditional jewelry displays, or obfuscated by focal length to mimic natural surroundings, adding to the complicated dichotomy present in the work, grounded first within the intimate gestures performed by Beckly and his father.
A Different Speed, 2025. Archival pigment print. 51 x 41 inches (framed)
These hunting veils primarily used to disguise and conceal take on new meaning as the symbols evolve throughout the exhibition. In A Different Speed, forest green mesh camouflage netting acts as trompe l’oeil emulating foliage softened by bokeh, a photographic backdrop to an asymmetrical spider web made of brass chain, a hand appearing on the other side to poke through an opening formed by a brass ring. The misshapen web is a reference to an experiment conducted by NASA, in which spiders were given various mind altering substances including caffeine, amphetamine and marijuanna to see how these would influence the patterns built by the affected spiders. Beckly purposely modeled his chain web on the speed-induced composition, resulting in something haphazard, loose and irregularly shaped. The lopsided and droopy web is simultaneously endearing and uneasy.
Conflicting motifs evoke the same in emotions, which linger long after our eyes turn away from Beckly’s images. This is his sleight of hand, and the magic of his work.
Handy Work, 2022. Archival pigment print. 36¾ x 24¾ inches (framed). Photo: LF Documentation
See more of Steven Beckly’s work on his Format portfolio website.
