Front Cover:
Exit Music #58 (The Effects of Passing through One Another) by Nathan Beard. Panel 4 of 5. Acrylic on panel. 48 x 36 inches. Private Collection. Photo by Scuderi Studios.
ON THE COVER: Artist Nathan Beard explains that “exit music is played at the end of a performance or movie while the audience is departing, signaling both the end of the imaginary world they were privy to and their sobering reemergence into daily life.” This is exit music, surely, but we all experience it in other contexts, too—to move presenters off-stage at the Academy Awards, to send a congregation home with a recessional hymn in church, to signal the departure of bride and groom from their wedding ceremony, or to sound as requiem and funeral march for a departed soul.
Beard’s artist’s statement for a 2017 show at the Highlands Museum of the Arts in Sebring, Florida, referred to these pieces as “personal meditations upon interconnectedness, the power derived through transformation and the nature of consciousness.” Over the past four years, in more than seventy numbered pieces, Beard has shared his meditations in a remarkable series of interconnected works evoking vibrancy, motion, flexibility, variety, rhythm, pattern, harmony, dissonance, and beauty.
