The figures in Beth Krebs’s video Winners begin as icons—trophy toppers, really: bodies posed for victory, calibrated to symbolize achievement. Then they start to slip. A gesture falters, a posture collapses, a bit of human behavior leaks in where it shouldn’t. The effect is funny, but not in a jokey way. It’s the recognition of something off, and familiar. Winners is part of “Because Now Is the Time of Monsters,” a group exhibition opening at Wassaic Project on May 16. The show will run through September 12.
Krebs, a Gen-Xer, came of age in a cultural moment steeped in irony, but her work operates on a different frequency. “I never was a good fit for the slick and nonchalant,” she says. “I care too much, I want too much, I worry too much—and it all shows.” Where irony keeps a protective distance, Krebs leans toward sincerity, even when it feels, as she puts it, “embarrassing, not cool.”
That sincerity is bound up with what she describes as the essential absurdity of making art at all—the gap between what you imagine and what you can actually pull off. Krebs traces it back to childhood, trying to sew clothes for a Miss Piggy puppet without the skills to do it. The scale has changed, but the feeling hasn’t. “You’re always trying to do a thing you don’t quite know how to get to,” she says. “It can feel absurd to try.”
In Winners, that absurdity takes shape through the visual language of achievement itself. Krebs began by dismantling and reassembling trophies sourced from reuse centers—winged victories that slump, gold cups that tilt, badges multiplied into collective awards. The video extends that logic into performance: human figures stand in for trophy toppers, straining to hold poses that suggest triumph but inevitably give way. Heroism, in Krebs’s hands, is something the body can’t quite sustain.
“I relate more to that than to the heroic gesture,” she says. “Humans can do amazing things, but we’re also…lumpy.” The humor that emerges from this tension isn’t there to score laughs so much as to open a door. “It softens people,” Krebs explains. “You’re less guarded. You’re more able to connect.”
Connection, for Krebs, is inseparable from vulnerability—a quality she sees as both a personal and political necessity. “Vulnerability and empathy are very connected,” she says, noting how easily both are dismissed as weakness. In a culture that prizes projection of strength—she points, obliquely, to the aesthetics of power in contemporary politics—her work insists on something else: the value of exposure, of acknowledging limits, of recognizing others.
If Winners dismantles the spectacle of winning, it also gestures toward a different ambition: to keep open the possibility of wonder in adult life. Krebs sometimes calls this “magic,” though she’s quick to clarify that she means something less fanciful than it sounds. It’s the refusal to accept that maturity requires resignation. “Not wanting to decide that this is all there is,” she says.
Art, in that sense, isn’t an escape from reality but a way of reframing it. “At its best, it presents some alternative to the present moment,” Krebs says. In Winners, that alternative isn’t another version of victory. It’s the permission to fall out of formation—and to recognize, in that collapse, something more human.
