Matt Keegan: Circulatory

Matt Keegan

Circulatory

October 28 – November 20, 2021

 

 

 

Altman Siegel is pleased to present a suite of new collages by Matt Keegan. Entitled, Circulatory, the works source their imagery from grocery ad circulars that arrive weekly on his doorstep. Individual items for sale, their prices prominently displayed, are meticulously extracted, sorted, organized, and rearranged into an intuitive associative system of the artist’s invention.  This body of work is the latest iteration to question the relationship between image and language, a subject that Keegan has explored through many projects and with different media.  These new collages relate directly to a previous series of videos, mining appropriated imagery from mass market publications which are also included here.

Since 2010, Keegan has repeatedly referenced a specific deck of ESL (English as a second language) flashcards handmade by his mother in the mid-1980s to early 2000s when she was teaching public high school and adult ed students in the suburbs of NYC. He was always surprised by the word or phrase that she associated with the images cut from advertisements and other mass-market print materials and found that the cards were, in fact, a kind of visual language of her own making.

Keegan first photographed his mother's deck of cards for the Image Transfer exhibition at the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington in 2011. Keegan recorded his mother assigning words and phrases to each card for the video, "N," as in Nancy, (2011).

"'N,' as in Nancy, (2011) is a looped, two-channel video of Keegan’s mother naming her own flash cards, an experiment that becomes something akin to a Rorschach test. We see her on the left, the cards on the right, each filmed against a white back drop, as in an instructional video. As each image appears, she identifies its corresponding word in a deadpan, if sometimes slightly annoyed, tone of voice. Some of the correlations are obvious, but many others are humorously opaque. Yet far from seeing this illegibility as a liability or weakness, Keegan understands it as indicative of the creative capacities of the linguistic system: in his words, it is a matter of the 'productive misuse' of a given cultural vocabulary. The multiplicity of potential meanings becomes 'a generative activity' that 'could eventually formulate a compelling visual lexicon.'”

 

– Tom McDonough, "Common Places Ready Made," OR, Inventory Press and Rogaland Kunstenter, 2015, pp. 39-55

In 2019, Keegan returned to his mother’s flash cards for a subsequent project, translating the still images culled from newspapers and magazines into a series of commercial-length videos.

Matt Keegan is an interdisciplinary artist based in New York. His work has been widely exhibited at venues including SculptureCenter (NY), the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts (Cambridge, Massachusetts), Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Grazer Kunstverein (Graz, Austria), The Art Institute of Chicago, and the New Museum. Keegan's work is represented in public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, NY; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, among others. His book 1996 was published in 2020, by New York Consolidated. Keegan is a Senior Critic in the Painting and Printmaking Department at Yale University. 

 

 

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