Erin O'Keefe: Book of Days

About

Denny Gallery is pleased to announce Book of Days, an exhibition of new photographs by Erin O’Keefe, running from April 6th to May 14th, 2017. This is the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

Erin O’Keefe’s images operate in the space between photography, painting and sculpture. Her new series, Book of Days begins with the construction of a series of simple sculptural objects made from painted cardboard and arranged on a studio tabletop. The camera is used to divine moments where the spatial coherence of the still life falls apart, fluctuating in pictorial space. The images reference the language of cubist and purist painting, and explore the phenomenal transparency of overlapping spaces and objects. But rather than building the illusion of three- dimensional space with paint and canvas, they reveal episodes of spatial ambiguity and contradiction resulting from the camera’s intrinsic distortions.

The exhibition also includes new images from her continuing series, Things As They Are. This work depicts tabletop setups of colored boards, transparent acrylic planes and painted sticks. Light, color, plane and line are used deliberately and concretely, as they are simultaneously tangible objects and elements that, mediated by the lens, become something more universal and abstract. In the photographs, shadows and reflections are as present and palpable as the objects that cast them. 

In both series, formal concerns are primary, along with questions about the way spatial conditions are transformed by the camera as three-dimensional form and space become two-dimensional image. 

Erin O’Keefe (b. 1962, Bronxville, NY) lives in New York City. She received her Master of Architecture degree from Columbia University and her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Cornell University. Her work has been exhibited at Wave Hill, The Photographer’s Gallery (London), Denny Gallery, Transmitter Gallery, McKenzie Fine Art, Sous Les Etoiles Gallery, Morgan Lehman Gallery, and Sandra Gering Inc. Her work has been reviewed or featured in The New Yorker, The Huffington Post, Hyperallergic, Collector Daily, Aperture, Blouin Artinfo, Artspace Magazine, and Paper Journal. 

Please join us for an opening reception for Erin O’Keefe on Thursday, April 6th, from 6 to 8 pm. Denny Gallery is located at 261 Broome Street in New York City. Gallery hours are Tuesday to Sunday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. For further information, contact Elizabeth Denny or Robert Dimin at 212-226-6537 or by email at elizabeth@dennygallery.com or robert@dennygallery.com.