Kiana Ruth Beckmen

Biography

Kiana Ruth Beckmen was raised on the Central Coast of California by Doctor of Osteopathy and an artist/environmental activist & organizer. After pursuing an undergraduate degree in art history, creative writing, and museum studies, she began using narrative media investigate the meta-poetics of material history, the mythologization of its preservation.

In layering media and archival reference informed by collage and papercut, she interrogates historical continuity in animation, artist’s books, ceramic sculptural installation, performance, and watercolor—often all at once. Polyvocal discourses staged in multimedia attempt to counteract dogmatism, especially regarding that which is taboo or traditionally oversimplified. Organic, maximalist, mystical, and intricate, the close-looking necessitated by elaborate details gestures towards the devotional labor of her practice, and an allegiance to text-based traditions. Illustration, painting, papercut, text, ceramic, textiles, vegetal matter, archival materials, sculpture, and material micro-aesthetics all play a strong role in her craft, guided by priorities of resourcefulness and service to communities of learning.  

Artist Statement

I am a transdisciplinary artist and writer obsessed with the entanglement of religion and history, the interwoven technologies of mysticism and scientific inquiry which shape the logic of our cultural landscape—particularly how we relate to our bodies and the ecosystems that sustain them. 

Adrift as we are in a melee of mythologized histories that are at once personal, sociological, and cosmic, the infrastructural matrices of belief systems which inform (and often entrap) our understanding, are invisible & insidious without archaeological intervention & imagination. By staging polyvocal dialectics around the sacralization of body literacy and eco(feminist) outlets of Jewish theology (and its degradation) across media, I dig at the roots of epistemological self-conception, and imagine (hopefully) empowering integrations of polyvalent knowledge systems grounded in iterative re-generation.  

My work is strongly motivated by cultivating and propagating folk* knowledge; densely storied terrains of community-sourced knowledge that contextualize our worldview with technologies of resourcefulness, and grounding awareness. An earthy sense of humor serves as humanizing agent. The work appeals to a devotional impulse, driven by aspirations of Tikkun Ha’Olam, to promote avenues of healing (in a broken world)— particularly in how we relate to our bodies, and the histories they ingrain. Jewish perspectives, knowledge, and history typically inform the content, not just for the benefit of Jewish understanding, but also because Jewish culture simultaneously reflects and diverges from centuries of mainstream culture, offering a mirror to storylines which can seem oppressively familiar.  

SCREAMSINGERS is an animated opera about Jewish mourning, particularly crying out for the “little” women’s mourning and magic traditions barely recorded by history, for the living goddess whose ghost infuses our cultural topography, and for the few women’s voices who break through a canon forcibly dominated by men.