John Keane. Flat Earth

About

His sustained artistic inquiry into military and social conflicts around the world has extended from Northern Ireland to Central America and the Middle East, where he was commissioned as the Official British War Artist of the Gulf War. 

The collection of works in the exhibition Flat Earth have been created over the last two years amid dramatic shifts in the domestic and global political landscape. From conspiracy theories to data mining, Keane’s subjects span the evolving and influential world of information technology and the resulting network of alternative facts, misinformation and cyber warfare.

Keane has used the metaphor of Flat Earth theory to explore perceived discrepancies between the modern age of evidence-based science and the spread of counter information and myths shared and popularised on the internet.The paintings depict the globe of planet Earth rendered in oil and a reactive metallic medium, creating a fluid exchange between illusory representation and the flat surface support. Keane’s use of metallic paint refers to the elements and minerals of the Earth’s crust from which the hardware of technology is fabricated, while the unpredictable process
of oxidation in this medium also suggests global fragility.

Keane shifts from natural materials to digital resources in a selection of paintings considering data mining, and its impact on the present international political landscape. Two paintings use an image of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg shown with a cool detached gaze. These are presented alongside a series of Despocracy paintings, which conflate the images of a number of national leaders into a single canvas. Shown together, Keane highlights the links between the harvesting of personal data and the outcome of recent democratic processes across the globe.

Again using reactive metallic paint, the Новичо́к (Novichok) paintings use negative images of the suspects in the Salisbury novichok poisoning in 2018.The revelation of the suspects’ identities and resulting information war presented, according to Keane, “a clash of empiricism and denial according to political preference,” describing his paintings as metaphors for “seeing only what conveniently fits a belief system, and ignoring that which is inconvenient.”