MATT KEEGAN – RECYCLE

Posted on 2020-03-16

As its title suggests, Recycle features new video, photography and collage-based work made from pre-existing mass-produced material, repurposed for this exhibition. In the three bodies of work exhibited, commercial images serve as tools for learning, archival material, and stand-ins for purported everyday needs. Tied to the subject of image-based communication—foundational to our present-day condition—Keegan examines ways in which meaning is produced through his selected photographs. Incorporating the language of advertising as his main point of reference, Keegan re-enacts and reanimates his sources by shifting them away from their initial context, frequently resulting in humour and satire.

Inspired by a collection of image-only flashcards, hand-assembled by the artist’s mother to teach English-language learning, Keegan’s commercial-length videos translate four static images into a time-based format. The original ESL flashcards were made by cutting photo reproductions out from catalogues, magazines, newspapers and other printed matter that came into Keegan’s home. He selected these four examples from a set of four hundred doubled-sided cards, for their variety of promotional content. The videos present the animation of the inanimate, the sexually charged, the biographical and the naming of particular subcultures, all through the filter of contemporary advertising.

Opposite – Exhibition view

Exhibition runs through to April 11th, 2020

Pedro Cera
Rua do Patrocínio, 67 E
1350-229 Lisbon
Portugal

www.pedrocera.com

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HEDDA STERNE

Posted on 2020-03-16

The works in this exhibition are drawn principally from the early 1960s when, inspired by a year and a half spent living in Venice as a Fulbright fellow, Sterne embarked upon a series of ostensibly quieter works composed of numerous horizontals that read as multiple horizon lines. These meditative Vertical Horizontals are at once self-contained, having a kinship with minimalist abstraction, and poetic intimations of landscape, with water and sky seemingly repeated and reflected multiple times within a single image. Sterne described her work as a process of ongoing exploration and discovery. The romantic tendency on display here, with opalescent whites, creams and greys and sonorous umbers interspersed with flashes of ochre, green and gold, is characteristic of a restless, searching quality, elaborated upon in a quote by the artist in which she states, ‘I believe… that isms and other classifications are misleading and diminishing. What entrances me in art is what cannot be entrapped in words.’

Opposite – Vertical Horizontal XVII, 1963

Exhibition runs through to March 21st, 2020

Victoria Miro Mayfair
14 St George Street
W1S 1FE London

www.victoria-miro.com

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