Katy Keefe and Vanesa Zendejas: Living With Them
@ Roots & Culture
1034 N Milwaukee Ave, Chicago, IL 60622
Opening Friday, April 1st, from 6PM - 9PM
On view through Friday, April 29th
Katy Keefe‘s work focuses on the translation of lived experience through the rehashing of visual influence. For this exhibition, process is used to explore the lineage of her choices. Keefe’s work follows a cyclical model in which sources influence and build knowledge upon each other, naturally revealing that everything stems from its beginnings. Currently, her concern lies within how older means of artmaking arose from domestic needs and has taken this as a starting point to observe her surroundings and daily inclinations. Coupling that with an existing visual language, she then applies those principles to the processes of ceramics, weaving and quilting. Meanwhile, in this play, paintings become weavings, weavings become paintings and ceramic objects find influence from the paintings. Keefe’s interest in doing this is to confuse the “appropriate” uses of the medium in effort to experiment with their histories and the sentimentality/relic status each subject matter has attained. Her resulting products are reconfigurations that remark upon the ancient aesthetic and the contemporary function.
Looking to the objects that surround us, the work of Vanesa Zendejas deals with the reconstructed modernism we live with and that which is present in our common knowledge of art history. Sculptures and works on paper resonate between classical abstract forms and familiar furniture, arrangements and textures. The work also looks to the more obscure American geometric abstractionists and their direct influences, always keeping in mind our modernist lineage and how that effects us.
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