ARTFORUM CRITIC'S PICK REVIEW by Annie Buckley
KEITH WALSH: Stealth Space
August 5th- 28th, 2011
Opening Reception
August 5th, 7-10 pm
In Conversation: Keith Walsh and Brad Spence
WEEKEND is psyched to present Stealth Space, an exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist, Keith Walsh. The exhibition includes a life-size metaspace vehicle, collages, and drawings created from the fragments collected during the artist's interspatial wanderings. These works humorously engage in ideas of the near and the far, inside and outside, foreign and familiar. At first glance, the collage works in the exhibition appear to be composed of angular shards of images depicting stars, nebulae, and outer space. In fact, what is depicted is a composite of photographs of the carpet and surroundings in Walsh's studio. Walsh takes his interspatial wandering to the level of durational performance with his "Travel Text" drawings. This work illustrates the long periods of time Walsh spent inhabiting the "The Stealth Vehicle" supplied only with coffee and fumes from his sharpie pen. While these playful approaches to constructing artworks have an inherent sense of humor, Walsh also applies a philosophical and intellectual rigor to the work and it's spatial underpinnings. The artist himself best describes the exhibition in the following statement regarding the work:
"What are you here for? We're all here...we're all here to go into space."
--William S. Burroughs
"For many artists the universe is expanding; for some it is contracting."
--Robert Smithson
"The Stealth Space exhibition engages the dialectic between the near and far, and what is mediated versus seen and experienced through the body. Stealth Space is about different perceptions of space and time mediated by the inhabitable Stealth Vehicle sculpture and its related two-dimensional work within the gallery context. The conceptual premise of the Stealth Vehicle sculpture is that any space existing beyond its own physical limits is deemed as 'outer space'-- hence positioning itself in relation to the sensibility of the gallery as a 'non-site.' The gallery, along with a participant's engagement, acts as an instrument to facilitating connections to the beyond. Stealth Space is grounded in American secular progressivism of the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan's sensibilities of mediated consciousness, and Space Age adventurism."
"The Stealth Vehicle sculpture is a flat black wedge-shaped vessel, the scale of which is reminiscent of early 1960s one-man space-exploration capsules. The sculpture is built to the artist's bodily proportions, and can be entered through a suicide style door. An upholstered interior features cylindrical instrument pods derived from marksman pistol targets and the absence of a steering apparatus and forward viewing window act as metaphors for the desire to control our destination..."
"The function of the gallery, which expands upon Robert Smithson's concept of the 'non-site,' provides a platform for the registration of matter and events. This phenomenon is in an eternal state of construction as an embodiment of the human desire to authorize or signify territories. Art nevertheless constructs space and time no less effectively than any digitally enhanced NASA image; both of these technologies subjectively register that which can only be sensed remotely from our earthly base. The experimental and participatory nature of this mission is further embodied in the textual works such as the "Travelogue" clipboard drawings performed by the artist while inside the Stealth Vehicle or the collage entitled "A Text That Does Not Yet Exist," which paradoxically encapsulates the philosophical spirit of this project."
--Keith Walsh, 2011
Keith Walsh's work has shown at various galleries and institutions throughout the United States, as well as in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and Italy. His work also is included in private and institutional collections in the US and Europe.
