Keegan McHargue, artist, New York
Michael Graves: Buildings and Projects 1982-89
Keegan McHargue writes: "Because I grew up walking by the Portland Building everyday growing up in Portland Oregon, wondering about it's nearly comical notion of classical motifs. It wasn't until much later that I was formally introduced to the work of it's creator, Michael Graves, and learned how large an impact he had not just on me, but on an entire generation (and those who would later rebel against them!)"
Keegan Mchargue is an artist living in New York. Go to his site here... Upcoming show in 2011 at Galerie Jeanroche Dard, Paris......
"In Keegan McHargue's work, the painting is both backdrop and stage, each work an uncanny tableau from a world not entirely unlike REALITY, in which grotesque characters are caught, unable to escape the capricious and twisted logic that produced them. Cut-out figures float over depthless grids, while the arches and walkways around them dead-end in the sudden flat-coloured ground of the canvas. Monstrous creatures attest to the potential of any part of the scene to develop into any other, to effloresce, bifurcate, become translucent or prismatic, according to the scheme of each unfolding allegory.
Fragmented views of factories of obscure purpose, their arcane pipework dripping flat teardrops, build into melancholy systems whose imagined functions reflect psychological circuits as much as they allude to the arbitrary and controlling infrastructures of the contemporary political economy. The faces that stare out of this fractured, animistic surface range from those of sentient puppets just free enough to flash a helpless, puzzled look to the audience as the scenery melts around them, to the carnivalesque masks of participants in some unknown, degenerate ritual."
taken from here...
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