Interview with Kevin Keaney | Conducted by Emma Riva
The question of how long to let a show run is an eternal one for art spaces. But this Friday, SKYPOMP has a simple answer: one night. If you don’t make it, well…you won’t see it! Bay Area-based painter Kevin Keaney drove across the country with a van full of paintings for one night of art viewing, live jazz by Fidelity Laurel, and artist Geoffrey Callahan grilling right on the pavement on Smithfield Street. How late will it go? Since it’s one night, that’s up to you. This exhibition exemplifies everything I love about SKYPOMP and why I collaborated with them in the first place, that it’s quirky, bohemian, and shoots high without knowing where it will land.
This is Keaney’s first time in Pittsburgh. While his work is so rooted in San Francisco, Pittsburgh viewers will see familiar reflections of a changing city in his neo-expressionist influenced collages.
Petrichor: What is your relationship to San Francisco, and how does it influence your art practice?
Kevin Keaney: arrived in San Francisco 38 years ago, when I was 27, from Cambridge, Massachusetts. I’d spent my entire life on the East Coast, and to San Francisco I brought a lot of attitudinal baggage from my past. San Francisco became a moral classroom for me. I learned a lot in those first couple of years by engaging with local and native San Franciscans. The city was wholly unlike anything I’d ever experienced.
At first, I wasn’t making art. It took five or six years before I found the practice. It evolved over the next three decades as I bore witness. I saw a city undergoing profound changes. When I moved there it wasn’t necessarily affluent — It’s a city built by the working class, and in 1988 it still felt like one. All great cities undergo catastrophe and change. Anyone who encounters my work will see catastrophe — implicit or explicit — it’s a product of documenting the city, which is the intention of my work.
The Bay Area’s complexity with its contradictions, beauty and social paradoxes are the elemental presence in all of my work. The palette, whether influenced by the intense natural environment, the photography or my abstract gestures, is borne of the intense street energy I am intimate with.
You often work at a very large scale. What is it like to create such big paintings, and what
appeals to you about it?
KK: I work across a range of scales, from postcard-size collage and bookmarks, to the large pieces – all to be featured at Skypomp. Working large is a consequence of the photographs I take. The large scale offers me a chance to pull an image from a photograph and blow it up — to articulate the power of a fragment. I never use the entire photograph. I crop. This form of editing creates a visceral sense of the object. Say it’s an old church: by cropping and enlarging the image I emphasize its architectural, political and cultural presence.
My goal is to have as much visual impact as possible, to keep the image with all its historical or social or political resonance, from becoming incidental in the composition. I love color so much that more is definitely better. When I can throw a huge swatch of cerulean blue onto the canvas and let it pour down the face of it I get a big kick out of it. I love it. Big is good, so is small, I just want to be intimate with the ideas and feelings I’m laying down.
“I love color so much that more is definitely better. When I can throw a huge swatch of cerulean blue onto the canvas and let it pour down the face of it I get a big kick out of it. I love it.”
How did you select the work for this exhibition?
KK: Most of the work here is my most recent finished pieces. One of the important things about showing these newer works is they reveal some major changes in compositional structure and balance relative to my earlier work. There is also a transition toward a more integrated palette. I’m excited to share these because they convey this evolution. There are also smaller pieces which very few people have ever seen, and I want people to engage with those.
“The idea of a community-centered, artist-run gallery is very valuable to me; it emphasizes the power of the connection of those three elements.”
Why did you decide to do a one-night-only exhibition?
KK: I like one night stands – Hah! Jokes aside, it’s timing. I enjoy the compressed nature of a one-night show. There’s something ephemeral about it. You come in, you celebrate with
Skypomp, the community, and the work. The idea of a community-centered, artist-run gallery is very valuable to me; it emphasizes the power of the connection of those three elements. Having never been to Pittsburgh I’m interested to meet its people. An event like this will do it. I love the synesthesia of an event like ours — the work, the food, the music, the people, all at once.
“The show is my testament to what makes The Bay such a complex, challenging, and compelling place to live. I understand Pittsburgh has its own challenges and traumas. They present differently and we suffer differently and we heal differently.”
What do you hope people take away from the show?
KK: I hope viewers engage with the beauty and intensity of the compositions. Also, how does Pittsburgh respond? The show is my testament to what makes The Bay such a complex, challenging, and compelling place to live. I understand Pittsburgh has its own challenges and traumas. They present differently and we suffer differently and we heal differently. I hope from coast to coast we’ll see what we have in common.
Visit Kevin Keaney for one night only on 9/11, 5PM-11PM at SKYPOMP (301 Smithfield Street).
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