Becky
Guttin
Bio
Becky Guttin
Becky Guttin was born and raised in Mexico City. The education she got from her parents, was enriched with museums visits, art conversations, reading and meeting with artists. Without knowing it, that's where her passion for art started. Becky got a degree in Mexico City as a Hebrew and Yiddish teacher. After some years of teaching, she asked for a Sabbatical year, which in fact continues until today. That's when she started consciously practicing art. All the family trips, together with the numerous working trips, have enriched her professional and personal life. Guttin is an internationally exhibited artist, she has been a guest lecturer all over the world. She has received seven art prizes and has participated in seventeen International Art Symposia and in fifteen Art Biennales. Guttin has been featured in thirty-eight solo exhibitions. She has worked in numerous countries. Forty nine of her pieces belong to permanent collections in museums, and in private and public spaces, such as universities, consulates, sculpture parks, cultural centers, hospitals, schools, etc. She worked as a volunteer at Scripps Hospital Encinitas for five years, where she led art therapy workshops. She Lives and works in San Diego. Becky Guttin has an independent studio where she continues to create sculpture, drawings, photography, installations and video. She loves to spend time with her family and friends, meet people and travel.
Pieces
Number of items found:
18
Artist's Statement
These are a lens-based series of photographic prints and photo-based objects that describe an ecotone—a transition area where the land meets the sea. While I photograph the San Diego coast, I remember forty years of sea level rise consumed the East Coast that I once knew. I submerge pigment prints and capture the surface of the picture moving off of the paper with my camera. This process underscores the temporality of an image and the transience of the shoreline. The resulting archival pigment prints depict warped photographs of the 2021 San Diego beach, as if they were floating in the ocean. As rectangular images morph into organic shapes, they transform from factual documents into large-scale memories, framed in white, and hung on the wall. I boil additional pigment prints from the same digital files in salt water to distress them, emulating weather and time. I memorialize these battered relics by mounting them on sand, salt, and resin (mimicking water), and sometimes frame them in black, cradled wood panels. Some of these works hang on the wall while others line a wooden walkway on the ground to mimic treasures found at your feet during a beach walk. These small artifacts, discovered and memorialized after the end of the familiar world, allude to a dark future, billions of years from now, when the rising tides ebb. While the framed prints assuage my anxiety about the homescape I will lose, the objects are keepsakes. I am intrigued by photography’s role in identifying and cementing the factual and fictitious topographies of my homescapes. I, too, am an ecotone and share my fears of losing the space I most identify with in hopes that others begin to lament the impending loss of our present day coasts.