Beatrix Reinhardt

Beatrix Reinhardt gave a lecture at University Galleries on October 27th, 2016. Reinhardt is an alumni of Illinois State University, where she received her Masters of Fine Art.

Reinhardt started the presentation by explaining how her residency in India dramatically changed her work output, and the work she shows in her presentation is work created post-India residency. She shifts to focusing her energy on creating work that revolved around the "politics of space" or the investigation of interior spaces.

Reinhardt poses some questions regarding interior spaces such as "How can decoration be an issue of demarcation?" and "can you tell
anything about the people who reside in this space?". After investigating interior spaces, Reinhardt moves to focusing on exterior spaces. Her photos covering the gas pipelines in Erdgasleitung is evidence of this. Reinhardt met with former works who built the pipeline, and received archival photographs from them. Through this experience working with the pipeline, she was able to piece together the idea that discovered exterior spaces need to be "charged places", filled with past, present, future and memory.

Reinhardt later applied for a residency in South Africa to explore battlefields. Through this experience, she created her first body of work. Reinhardt assumed she was finished with this body and returned to the States, only to realize something felt incomplete. Reinhardt later returned to South Africa, and created more work. Through her second trip, she felt more connected to the battlefields, and took on a new approach to her photos, where she documents the land in an almost scientific record keeping manner.

Overall, Reinhardt covered a lot of ground in her short presentation. While her work was impressive in the sense that she constantly changes perspectives and mediums, I would've loved to hear more information in greater depth for just one more two bodies of work, instead of barely scratching the surface on seven or eight bodies of work.