To Be Joined in Delight 

Banner image: Alexandra Beaumont, Everybody, Everybody, installation view at Flaten Art Museum. Photos by Cory Eull unless otherwise noted.

 

Imagine for a moment a night out on the town dancing with friends. Maybe Jetset Underground is the place you go to bust a move, or perhaps you prefer the dingy charm and Queer Contra of the Eagles Club. With an army of heels, boots, and sneakers asynchronously hitting the floor and projections animating the walls while beams of colored light intersect with dancing limbs, you feel a sense of exhilaration and intoxication — not just from the spirit-heavy Negroni hitting your bloodstream, but from the pulse of music and movement this room is united in. With cloth cascading to the floor like unfinished sentences and the placement of an air vent bringing a shimmy to one of the ornamented banners (Move to the Front), Alexandra Beaumont’s Techniques for Ecstasy constructs an ode to dance parties big and small, and to the sensory experiences that make communities feel alive. 

 

Alexandra Beaumont, Move to the Front.

 

In Beaumont’s second exhibition of Techniques for Ecstasy, she presents nine of the original 18 works shown in May 2024 at Public Functionary. Bringing her collection to the Flaten Art Museum of St. Olaf College, Beaumont was invited to mentor student curators from the exhibition across the hall, UPRISING VIII: Vivid Motion, Living Dreams. Beaumont and the students — Jan-Rose Davis, Ariel Edwards, Bassaa Tufaa, and Queenie Wynter — met a handful of times since December of 2024. She recalls from their initial conversations, “How could they use the exhibition to foster more community within the Black student population? They mentioned that there were these pockets of community from African Diasporic students and then Black American students and wanting to…create more of a sense of shared community within those populations.”

For the last eight years, the UPRISING exhibitions have been a place for Black student (and alumni) artists to showcase their most unfettered expressions. Working with Beaumont encouraged the student curators to take artistic liberties, encourage the inherent artistry of their community, and welcome the spectrum of Black passion to their exhibition space.

“My work is about how we come together in celebration, so immediately there was a lot of overlap in the spirit of the shows that we were producing,” Beaumont says. The coinciding exhibitions opened with a celebratory dance party, a creative element that has become vital to Beaumont’s unfolding practice.

When Beaumont was away from friends during the pandemic, she requested they send photos of themselves dancing. From there, she made her first series of cloth pieces inspired by images of bodies in joyous movement, titled Dancing With Friends. The work in Techniques for Ecstasy is an echoing of photographic documentation taken at a dance party hosted at Public Functionary in 2023, where those initial works depicting the dancing bodies of Beaumont’s beloved community were on display. 

 

Alexandra Beaumont, Soloist.

 

“With the dance parties, my feeling is to step aside as much as possible. That's when I get to indulge in my voyeuristic or witnessing tendencies, because I love to see how other people show up in those moments of joy when the invitation is extended,” she says. Beaumont takes that witnessing and offers up what is seen through her own perspective. She’s capturing moments of shared joy in time, but not freezing them entirely. The nature of Beaumont’s work has been a continued conversation — a call and response of expression between viewer and participant. Using sheer fabrics, beadwork, applique, sequins, and embroidery, Beaumont’s textile collages are assembled by hand. The figure pieces suspend from the ceiling like pillars, swaying and rippling as they acutely respond to the environment of the gallery. 

“It’s about the spirit of being in community, being on the dance floor, the dynamic, physical moving in and out that happens in dance spaces, and so being able to stage the work off the wall in a way that you can just weave in and out is essential for this body of work,” she says. The medium has a movement of its own: it is versatile and creates that flow, the cascading effect that Beaumont continues to admire.

With titles referencing songs, Beaumont draws from her spirited youth as a child of nightclub musicians. She also notes just how much music was listened to in the making of this body of work, and pointing to the QR code printed on the wall of the gallery, leading to the exhibition's very own playlist full of funk and groove, including gems such as "People Ain’t Dancing" by Billen Ted and Kah-Lo, and "Jack Your Body" by Steve “Silk” Hurley. 

In her piece titled Turn this Mutha Out, there are four figures layered. Some are traced in paint, in sequins, and others’ silhouettes are cut out of fabric. The collaging gives the illusion that there are either four distinct movers, or perhaps that each outline is a still frame from the dynamic dance of one mover. With Soloist, a clear-cut shadow mimics the figure clothed in sheer at the center of the collage. This dancer moves to a tune different from the others — a quieter, more contemplative joy.

 

Alexandra Beaumont, Turn This Mutha Out, with Jack Your Body in the background.

 

By way of explaining her technique of abstracted cloth collage, Beaumont says, “the images of the dance party [Dancing With Friends, 2023] had such dynamic lighting. It was so saturated and colorful and that was a huge part of my memory of that moment, and I really wanted to bring that experience to the viewers of the exhibition, to put that in the art as well, not just the figurative depictions of the dancers but this kind of light, scintillating, sensory aspect of it.”  

That kaleidoscopic effect comes through in the figures, the layers of sheer and the glistening of sequins and glass beads hinting at something euphoric. “With the layers of sheerness too, that’s been really fun to play with, and evocative of the experience of being under the lights. And then you get these amazing shadows cast onto the wall that just add more dimensionality to the space, and silhouette the dancers in different ways, or in the case of this piece, Come My Way, duplicate the dancer onto the wall so you're getting this voluminous overall effect,” she explains.

 

Alexandra Beaumont, Come My Way.

 

“I think this work is bridging a divide between the depiction and the experience, I didn’t just want to recreate the dancers even though I did want to pay a meaningful and honest tribute to their joy that I witnessed. But then once you take that and you put it in a decontextualized space in a different community, with people who weren't there sharing that moment, what is it meant to mean to them? I want folks to witness as I did, the power of the joyful release that these people were experiencing then, to feel it as a celebration of these individuals and also as an invitation to embrace your own joy and expression,” Beaumont says. “It's beautiful to be in a space full of color with these fabrics swirling around, moving around, and the dancers are a little larger than life and elevated. It's really cool to see kids come into the show because they will immediately start mimicking the poses, and start dancing. Which is the point, right?” 

Techniques for Ecstasy is a reminder that joy, in all its forms, belongs to each and every one of us. As sure as our bodies are warm and rhythm pulls us to move, joy will be felt again and again. ◼︎ 

 

Alexandra Beaumont, right, speaking with her good friend, Angie Tillges — who is depicted in the show — at the Techniques for Ecstasy opening at the Flaten Art Museum at St. Olaf. Photo by Samuel Gwin, courtesy of St. Olaf College.

Techniques for Ecstasy is on view at the Flaten Art Museum through April 6. Gallery hours are Mon, Tues, Wed, & Fri: 10 am – 5 pm; Thurs: 10am – 8pm; Sat & Sun: 12 – 4pm.

To see more of Alexandra Beaumont's work, visit her website or follow her on Instagram @anbeaumont.