26th November – 19th December 2009
Opening Celebration: 1pm Saturday 5th December
Allan’s Walk Artist Run Space
Shops 5 & 7, Allan’s Walk, Bendigo
Opening Hours: Thursday & Friday: 11am – 4pm, Saturday: 11am – 3pm
Mirror, Mirror will consist of two large installations, one in each shop of Allan’s Walk Artist Run Space. The exhibition surveys a range of the artist’s work, covering some breadth of the artist’s oeuvre, including painting, photography & drawing.
Two themes are strongly observed; the first a preoccupation with the portrait and especially the self-portrait, the second the need to reflect one’s environment, and how this in turn reinforces or imbues the portraits with a greater sense of gravity.
Keena draws heavily from her “drawing” practice of photography and the collection of images. Reminiscent of the photographic work of Nobuyoshi Araki, Keena exposes her private life. From the mundane to the intimate, there is perhaps a somewhat obsessive compulsion to record and to retain the detritus of modern life.
The sheer proliferation of photographs could trivialise the work; however the artist chooses to paint from some images rather than others. This selection allows Keena to monumentalise moments, thrusting them into the canons of art history.
In the same sense that the Impressionists sought to capture the fleeting nature of light; to paint from the mirror or the photograph, as in all depictions, can only attempt to hint at the “élan” or essence of what is contained in the vignette and only as seen by the artist. The mirror acts as a description of reality however this is all the image is; it is not reality and it is not tangible.
Knowing this, the artist attempts to go beyond presenting scenes, and to instead immerse the viewer in an experience not dissimilar to the artist’s own cognition of existence. To do this the artist has intervened in the space of the gallery, installing simulacra of Keena’s private internal and external life as ontological ruminations.
Mirror, Mirror