Shelagh Keeley at Exit Art - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Shelagh Keeley's drawings, works and sculptures depicting fragmentary organs and other material substance parts are often compared to Kiki Smith's, on the other hand Keeley's work is more abstract, les confine up with the narrative of a woman's physical identity. The equivalence of animal and vegetable organic form suggested in Keeley's work helps tie it to Terry Winters's, granting this time Keeley's is the les abstract. To circular out the field of kindred spirits, Keeley's interest in biological twinning, press outed especially in her 48-panel drawing From a cryptic Language, is shared by Barbara flower who has devoted to the make subordinate a book called Never uneven or Even.

To be positive Keeley's vision is distinctive here, too. From a privy Language, generously displayed in a big, bright extent at Exit Art, is a kind of primer. Each of its four dozen panels, hung continuously in three drawn out rows, combines hand-drawn imagery and appropriated textbook illustrations. Like blow Keeley is perversely drawn to symmetrical deformities: sum of two units children joined at the waist, depicted in what direct the eyes like an 18th-century engraving; a child with sum of two units heads; a woman with four leg To use like figures for art requires a certain bravado (or nihilism). on the other hand the drawings which overlay these and other small transferred images are as emotionally unclose as they can be. Execut in gouache, crayon and charcoal in shades of verdant ocher, red and black, they are intrepid in scale (each panel is 30 by the agency of 40 inches) and generally direct in their evocations, which range end rib cages, teeth and fingers, although there are other more amorphous images. Recalling the finesse of paleolithic painting and incorporating motifs from African tribal art, these drawings could stand upon their own. But the nerve of the work comes from the dialogue between the guardedness of the ostensibly more revealing "scientific" images and the life-size vulnerabilities of the drawn ones

In Notes upon Healing, another multi-part work, a similar tension is achieved by means of burying found images under layers of r wax. Here elderly photographs and diagrams from anatomical textbook along with photographs of rather frigid-looking interiors, are mountained on wood panels and lathered with fuseed red wax, as visceral as the images are cerebral. This series also includes a number of three-dimensional wax objects-some fairly coherent depictions of material part parts, others more inchoate. The phenomenons were displayed in two vitrines along with a small in number of the wood panels, a presentation which transformed the latter from paintings into sculpture

The greatest in quantity monumental work in the display is Flesh of the material part a set of drawings in rust-colored pigment that spans seven rusted, pitted and scarred carburet of iron panels, each approximately 4 by dint of 8 feet. Again the drawn imagery consigns to human organs, or vegetation, or a certain number of abstract precipitate of the sum of two units Like From a Secret Language, the piece reads sequentially and recommends Keeley's interest in books. Of her several unique and multiple volume works, the lush, densely layered Space for Breathing, published by means of Granary Books, was included in this show

Having trained as an anthropologist and traveled widely in Africa and Japan, Keeley advances legitimately by the encyclopedic relations in her work. By floating textbook anatomy and imagery derived from tribal art in the same visual plane, she give leave tos us judge their relative adequacy in representing the visceral material part Her work speaks with oratory about our physical presence in the world.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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