Eye to Eye, a Virtual Exhibition, includes three new photographs by Erin O’Keefe and will run concurrently with her exhibition Seeing Things at the New York gallery.
The three photographs, Pink Push, Threesome, and Esther, are emblematic of the artist’s current work, an ongoing series called Built Work. The video produced for the exhibition is a behind-the-scenes look into O’Keefe’s studio process, where you can watch her arrange the wooden blocks and painted boards that she sets up so precisely to create her final, two-dimensional compositions. Surrounded by her workspace and reference materials, O’Keefe speaks openly about her practice and background.
Works from Eye to Eye will be available online only through November 5, 2019.
More than a little of the considerable appeal emanating from Erin O’Keefe’s photographs lies in the difficulty we encounter deciphering them. With these works—razor-sharp depictions of abstract, brushily painted, sculptural tableaux, for the most part—not only does one struggle to identify the medium, but the compositions traffic in shadowy illusion and spatial ambiguity, making it hard at times to know exactly what is being portrayed.
As is the case with most abstract photography, be it historical or contemporary, these works place willful obfuscation in dynamic tension with objective disclosure. Once identified as photographs (and despite our diminished faith in representational veracity in an era of pervasive digital image editing), O’Keefe’s works draw the viewer into a conscious examination of components as an instinctual effort to wrest meaning and purpose from equivocal information. It is this sense of quandary, in combination with the artist’s mastery of technical and formal principles—her ability to extract such a remarkable concinnity from the collapse of painterly, sculptural, and photographic effects—that makes these works so exceptional.
The camera enables me to find these moments that actually don’t exist in the real world—you could never see it that way with your eyes. That an image has a kind of autonomy from its subject and from its condition of making.
