On view as part of the Lower East Side Bid Armory Week Gallery Tour on March 9, 2014. Hours to be announced. http://www.armoryartsweek.com/home/about

Station Independent Projects is pleased to present To Beat the Band, a new installation by Beth Krebs that includes objects, drawings, sound and video.

Krebs’ work celebrates the earnest, heroic, and usually botched human efforts at transcendence. While her previous interactive environments imagined a transformation of place, this new work considers what is required of the individual who continues to insist that such transformations are possible. The works in To Beat the Band are animated by a clumsy yearning that renders them wincingly vulnerable.

The exhibition features Krebs’ new video work, Plumb, where a three- dimensional blob stirs and slowly gathers momentum, losing and gaining it in an effort to lift off. A series of sculptures with fleshy folds, titled Low Rise, appear exposed and on display. The neighboring line drawings, Fenced Fatties, present a possible back story for the sculptures. Slung across the gallery is a pennant flag. Part object and part drawing, it is a gesture of fatigued optimism, which is amplified by the slow plodding of intermittent parade marches.

Krebs writes, “It’s embarrassing to continue to search for breathless enchantment when your ass crack is showing.” And yet To Beat the Band is ultimately a celebration of that impulse. However naïve or doomed, the faith that magic hovers nearby is infinitely preferable to a world without it. Krebs’ gestures are presented with humor and some apprehension, but above all with tender regard.

Beth Krebs has exhibited her work in galleries and alternative spaces in New York City and abroad, including the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Mixed Greens, Smack Mellon, the Bronx Museum of Art, the Cue Foundation, Real Artways, and the Elizabeth Foundation Project Space. She was awarded a grant from the Buchegger Foundation to fund an installation in Germany in 2012. She was chosen to participate in the Artist in the Marketplace (AIM) and Aljira Emerge programs, and has been an artist in residence at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Jentel Colony, the MacDowell Colony, Sculpture Space, and the Bemis Center. She was a recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant in 2004. She earned her Masters of Fine Arts from Rutgers University in New Jersey, where she was awarded the Paul Robeson Emerging Artist Award upon graduation. Beth Krebs lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Beth thanks the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, whose support made the development of this work possible.