Shelagh Keeley Steel Notebook, New Delhi, India 2004 (detail)

the exhibitions

Shelagh Keeley
 

Join us on Sunday, 21 March for a
Workshop, Lunch and Lecture with artist
Shelagh Keeley

10:00 a.m. Workshop $10.00
12:00 p.m. Lunch $25.00
1:30 p.m. Lecture Complimentary


Register with Alexis Ward
award@rmg.on.ca or 905.576.3000 Ext. 109

16 January, 2010 - 21 March, 2010

Opening Reception: Sunday, 17 January at 1:00 p.m.

Curated by Linda Jansma and Carol Podedworny

Shelagh Keeley came to prominence in Canada—and subsequently in the United States and internationally—in the early 1980s. Like many of today’s senior Canadian artists, Keeley has a significant early body of work that is housed in numerous Canadian institutions and, given Keeley’s residence in New York City for twenty-two years, in most major American institutions. Despite Keeley’s oeuvre being well-documented throughout North American collections, there does not exist a comprehensive critical assessment of her contribution to the ongoing discourse on contemporary art over the past thirty years. This exhibition will answer this “gap,” examining Keeley’s contribution to artistic form, concept, process and discourse over that three-decade period.

This exhibition includes a later wall work entitled Steel Notebook, New Delhi, India (2004), originally created on-site at a gallery in India. Now owned by the Robert McLaughlin Gallery, this work references not only Keeley’s wall-based practice, but also the numerous artist-made bookworks she has created over the course of her career. These bookworks, a selection of which are featured in the exhibition, serve as an archive of the visual vocabulary that Keeley has created during nearly three decades of practice. They are also a record of themes that have pervaded artistic practice in Canada during the same period: diversity, history, representation, the body and, more generally, that which is political and social. What had previously been considered external to the museum and to an artist’s practice came to the forefront of artistic discourse in Canada during Keeley’s entrée to the scene, and she had a significant impact on the production that would become important evidence of this era’s interests.

Organized in collaboration with McMaster Museum of Art