Eponanonymous

For a few years now, Matt Keegan has exemplified a particular approach to being a contemporary artist: collaborative, curatorial, writerly, media-breaching. Two main ends are served by this. First is the creation of a rich discursive space that offers many points of entry. Second is the massaging-into-being of an elaborate content that gains clarity through its gestalt shape rather than its oblique particulars.

In his exhibition that opened last night at D’Amelio Terras, a carefully cultivated method is on display, as much as any single work. Many hats are absent: it’s not collaborative, or publisher-ly, or the rest. Nonetheless, a certain slipperiness and displacement keeps the conversation tip-toeing around amongst the work, letting itself be glimpsed through the repeated cut-outs that simultaneously obscure and reveal.

The best work hovers between its idea and its execution. In every case here, this involves cutting. The left side of the gallery begins with the giant self-portrait cut-out, “Humberto, Humberto, Humberto”. The artist is positioned on a toe, chair pulled out from under, leaning into the corner. The title directs us down two avenues of reference: as master of self-conscious, carnal ceremonies, he’s Nabakov’s Humbert Humbert; and with three iterations of the image, recursively residing in the next larger head, it points to Homunculus, Homunculus, Homunculus. Of course, the largest figure is too big to fit inside any head, unless we think of the gallery space itself as a giant psychic chamber.

The wall on the left is lined by a set of cut and layered photographs that, while the most modest in scale, also offer the greatest emotional charge. In each, a figure (the artist?) sits in a chair in a living room. Keegan has cut away the person and left the room, and collaged together several versions of the same theme. Fragments are visible through the successive openings, but while new details can be seen, they refuse to reveal. Together the photographs feel like frustrated attempts at memory, and they show that the materiality of any image necessarily precedes its ability to capture, and remind.

Matt Keegan
Untitled, 2007, approx. image size: 7 x 5 inches, collaged c-prints
(image taken from gallery website)

Absence, or more correctly, negative space, serves the opposite function in the large sheet-rock and metal-stud screen that divides the gallery. On the clean white side, Keegan has cut away a letter-form on each facet of the screen so that it reads “Good to see you”. The empty spaces allow this action to literally take place, as those on the other side of the screen fill and energize our field of vision. Here language is being held up directly against the world, and put to the test. (I suppose it’s a sign of optimism that it’s good to see whomever may wander by.) While in the photographs, the cut was an act of withholding, here it’s an act of giving.

The last major occurrence of cutting is in a work that has four versions. Parallelograms formed by the repetition of the word “M E N” are carved into the gallery wall. The letters are sometimes removed, exposing layers beneath the paint surface; or they are partially removed, and refilled with what appears to be joint compound (but I’m not sure); the grid of text is superimposed, inverted, shifted out of phase - in philosophy of science, what would be called a set of “translations and transformations”. The trembling edge between exactitude and hand-made activates these pieces on close inspection; and to return to the metaphor of the gallery as a large psychic space, it appears that the artist has something on his mind, but that he can only scratch the surface of it.

To this viewer, the left half of the space is much more convincing than the right half. The eponymous piece “Any Day Now” has a lovely material presence - a grid of photos pinned to leaning sheetrock - but there is little to be done with the message of the text. It exists at face-value, and to my reading, doesn’t expand down multiple avenues. The two different photo sets are even more oblique, and while their visual and textural quality is consistent with the other work, I don’t know where they’re trying to take me. Because the prints lack any subsequent physical intervention by the artist, they feel too mute.

With this show, Keegan presents himself as a patient and thoughtful artist who is ready to give the benefit of the doubt to the sensitivity of his viewers. This is a highly welcome posture. Through all of his various activities, he demonstrates that there are many ways in, through, and out of working as an artist, and that each offers its own rewards. Attention to the inherently discursive quality of materials is his strong suit, and yet his work still reminds us that intellectual exchange need not preclude an emotional poignancy.