Viewing Room
season 2020 – 2021
The wrongness of images, or our appreciations of them: What appears to be a painting is actually a photograph. What appear to be two-dimensional painted lines, curves, rectangles, arabesques, planes of color, or abstract geometrics with tromp l´oeil shadows are in fact three-dimensional objects carefully arranged, brightly illuminated, and flattened into a beguiling single plane by the lens of a camera.
The eye recognizes but cannot entirely unravel distortion; the mind flits between different possibilities. However, as with Wittgenstein´s duck- rabbit, Escher´s irrational cube, or Penroseés tribal, no settled reality emerges. Is the swath of turquoise blue in Circle, Circle flat or angled? How does one black circle face us directly, while the other lies flat and foreshortened, like Holbein´s famous disk-shaped skull?
O´Keefe´s photographs, subtly, even cheerfully, disrupt the eyes´s or the cameras ability to comprehend space. The artist´s work recalls her background in architecture, a discipline in which model building – the construction of synthetic trials and variants of space in miniature as a means of testing possibilities – is essential.
O´Keefe produces images that are also intensely painterly, with a sensitive understanding of the spatial play, perspective, color, and incongruity in the works of artists as varied as Josef Albers, Giorgio de Chirico, Le Corbusier, Henri Matisse…O´Keefe´s works are more than canny analog reminders of the digitally manipulated images and technological unrealities that surround us, of our need to remember that we do not always know what we are looking at. Her photographs assert the positive value of uncertainty and not knowing and induce the pure retinal pleasure of trying to unriddle a collision of colors and planes that shift and slide, refusing to stay fixed. They are the product of a practice in which repetition – not to mention , time, effort, patience and absorption – produces unexpected combinations.
In O´keefe´s tiny, jewel-colored constructions photographed large, the space of the studio-iterations of space within this space – transcends itself for a momento only. The are records of an artist thinking in two and three dimensions at once.