Paige Beeber’s recent paintings extend her commitment to mark-making as a metaphor for psychological and social transformations. With a grammar of marks that reference weaving and needlepoint, Beeber shows how small, diligent acts of making and repairing—which are often gendered feminine—can be even more heroic and romantic than gratuitous acts of violence. Beeber points to sci-fi writer Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1986 essay “The Carrier-Bag Theory of Fiction,” in which Le Guin asks her readers to reimagine stories of female-oriented “gathering” with as much life-or-death drama as male-oriented “hunting.” Instead of writing “with my spear, I slay this bear,” she wonders, why not tell “a gripping tale of how we wrested the wild oats from their husks”? Beeber takes up this challenge in her paintings, producing bold compositions filled with high drama and risk but with none of the clichés of Action Painting.

Courtesy of Freight+Volume