“I raise my stein to the builder who can remove ghettos without removing people as I hail the chef who can make omelets without breaking eggs,” Robert Moses, the New York City planner responses to allegations of being an anti-preservationist in 1965. His plan for the city didn’t include intimate neighborhoods but rather towers and highways, this city structure, Moses’ vision left half complete, has forced the city to develop around his grid take on a life of it’s own. For his second show at D’Amilo Terras,New York artist Matt Keegan, begins his exploration of New York iconography and Moses’ urban development with title of the show, which is a collaborative work with designer David Reinfurt, using the logo from Da Appell (Amsterdam) to replace the heart in the familiar “I ♥ NY”. The end result is a statement, which read pictographically, reads “I Apple NYC”. In lieu of a press release, Keegan prefaced his current solo show with an interview conducted with the designer of the “I ♥ NY” logo, Milton Glaser. The text focuses on the lasting power that Glaser’s iconic design has held, “I believe that the popularity came from intuitive responses to the material, and the question of what provokes a memory is a very complex one.” Glaser responds in the interview.It introduces Keegan’s exploration of the way New York has been shaped and mediated, from boosterish T-shirt designs to Robert Moses’ overhaul of the city’s streets in the mid 20th Century. “I’m interested in how we understand the city, how that is informed by direct experience and what was prescribed through based on narratives or information that is circulated in the media,” Keegan told *A.i.A*. In his 2008 work *Americaamerica, *Keegan presents a book of interviews and cultural artifacts from a trip across the United States to try and formulate an answer to the question "How did we get here?” In this current show, Keegan focuses that same question on his home city and expands to include personal narrative, architecture and sculpture. In the gallery, 15 sheets of large sheet metal are mounted length wise against three of the galleries walls. Each painted monochrome, which match the unchanging paintjobs from the five bridges that connect the boroughs of New York. Scattered over the panels Keegan has hung 60 photographs he took while walking the city—a meandering set of manholes, storefronts and streets; images of locations, people and objects that are of personal interest to the artist who grew up in Long Island has lived in the city for 13 years. These photos are informed by a recent book work *A History of New York (2011)* that Keegan created in response to the PBS production *New York: A Documentary Film* by Ric Burns in which he took images from the documentary and produced a book that contained the image but without captions or context. The photographs show in the exhibit shift from following a prescribed and linear history like the images in the book to a more organic flow of images from Keegan’s daily life in NYC Keegan also created a nine-minute documentary video, *Biography Biographer*, a conversation between the artist and his father about New City urban planner Robert Moses. Keegan’s father worked as a caddy at a Moses’ golf club as a teenager; he was deeply awed by the older man’s poise and presence. The artist activated his father to “explain his own biography and the experience of understanding power structures.” In doing so a poignant dialog is unveiled and the naivety of being youth is reflected upon, it challenges the viewer to disregard preconceived biographical information about Moses and adjust to this personal recollection, from one someone who, not until later in life, realize the power that Moses really held over millions of people. The combination of narratives—triangulating between the artist, his father, and Moses—suggests a tense and psychological struggle of translating modes of storytelling, not trusting the voice of the omniscient narrator. “Between talking with Milton, responding to the Burns documentary, and then making the video about my father, I was interested in how the space between them functions in relations to my photographs - which are not finite statement or facilitating a singular but rather work in opposition,” says Keegan. The show invokes a similar exploration of terrain to Lawrence Weiner’s NYC Manhole covers Project, "In direct line with another and the next,"(2000) referring to the grid of New York City's Streets, they can be found in 19 locations below Union Square. The text on each manhole cover offers a ceritude of location to the pedestrian, bringing into question the relationship they have with the humans and objects around them – and distancing the from nature that the architecture of the city has imposed on them. Keegan’s photographs and installation draw subtle acclimation to the lives that exist in the image of modernity and the rigid structure of the gridded streets in NYC. An image of a standard wooden chair in a white apartment, the back of a U Haul truck or a brick wall, familiar sights that remain fixed in a city that is constantly refreshing itself. These snapshot photos take the familiar compositional form and place it upon the unchanging color of the bridges, it challenges the viewer to leave the gallery and reconsider how they view and intake the city on a daily basis, consider how a city can make a life its own.
Year: 2011
Clients: ArtinAmerica
Category: Writing