Artist Tracey Keilly is quickly becoming one of Los Angeles’ emerging stars. With her upcoming show at SCHEUBLEIN Fine Art in St. Moritz to previous showings at LACMA and Barnsdall Frank Lloyd Wright Hollyhock House, Keilly’s artwork is certainly turning heads in the art world. Her creative collages, which combine graphic images from pop culture, painting and photography, are a complex, poignant study of the modern political, social, and psychological psyche. She reveals vulnerabilities in society and illuminates their connectivity.
Keilly’s work has been called “visually arresting” by curator Alison Gingeras. Publisher of Artforum, Knight Landesman describes it “intense and wild”.
As she expresses it, “My work is part accidental and part planned. I have a vision most certainly, but will not manipulate the final outcome, and am always surprised by what is revealed. It’s much like a dream where all the seemingly insignificant fragments that happen throughout the day form a story to relay messages from the subconscious that facilitate growth.”
Being a world traveler, her art education emerged as she interacted with artists in Morocco, Egypt, Greece, Italy, Paris, London, Spain, and Israel. She met with, among others, Portanier in the South of France, Tumarkin in Israel, and Raul Corrales in Cuba (Fidel Castro’s and Che Guevara’s press photographer during the revolution).
She credits her inspiration to Andre Breton, Marie Louise Von Franz, Carl Jung, Kienholz, and Basquiat.
Mark Greenfield, curator of the Municipal Art Gallery in Los Angeles, stated, “Her work breaks with convention in its pure honesty and unpretentiousness, and to the extent to which it displays little semblance of self consciousness, it is refreshingly original. The work stimulates dialogue on contemporary issues of politics, race, consumerism, cultural anthropology and a myriad of other subjects that inform our approach to social interaction. Her complex arrangement of visual elements creates layers of meaning that challenge us to unfamiliar realms of introspection.”
Keilly’s work has been shown in exhibitions for emerging artists, including the internationally recognized Los Angeles County Museum of Art. At age twenty-three, LACMA felt her work spoke for the current generation and gave her a five year contract to help develop her craft with a space to exhibit her new pieces.
Director Mike Mills chose her work for an exhibition thematically tied to his Sundance award winning film Thumbsucker. She is one of the youngest artists to be included in the prestigious Cedars Sinai collection, which was the inspiration of the eminent contemporary art collector, Frederic Weisman. Recently, Keilly had a one person show at a New York City gallery and a group show at the Barnsdall Frank Lloyd Wright Hollyhock House.
Keilly’s upcoming exhibit, a group show called “Moving Images” at the historic Scala Cinema in St Moritz, will depict contemporary artists making use of different techniques to illustrate cinematic poetry. Scheublein Fine Art describes her part of the show as, “Stripping the Romantic alpine idyll off the Heidi novel and uncovering the dark sides of the idealizing film stage.” Keilly’s “Heidi-ng in Hinterland“ piece is a collage of film stills, text extracts and personal photograph, which she then painted over. The pop-up show opens February 17th and runs until February 19th.
Currently, her work can also be viewed at the Alexander Hotel and will remain exhibited during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. For more about local artist Tracey Keilly, visit www.traceykeilly.com
(Art Show 101 – Tracey Keilly from Francisco Gramage on Vimeo.)
