Keith Duncan Exhibition

CUE Art Foundation

poster for Keith Duncan Exhibition

This event has ended.

Artist's statement

Mark Twain wrote in his 1897 essay How to Tell a Story:
"... Story depends for its effect on the ‘manner' of the telling..."

The Storyteller is one who is constantly searching for his or her self. Furthermore, they need a public with which to identify. Through reading Art and Psychoanalysis and An Art of Our Own: The Spiritual in 20th Century Art, I have discovered some things. First, what artists think of and how they think is vital to the artists survival,
process and growth in a creative sense. To analyze the world of an artist usually is a complex and exhaustible study. In each research the results are primal-oriented, stemming from childhood experiences and autobiographical development through self-analytical discovery. The primal is evident in each artist's work. The upbringing
of an artist does have some affect on their work because belief systems can have a lasting influence on the artist's work. In my narrative and social-political symbolism, I have discovered psychological ties to my childhood and an array of relationship patterns and experiences, also with a combined style to past artists and their childhood biography. Metaphors and manifestations of mother-child relationships, and the oedipal stages have shaped my insight and experiences to a great degree.My style is a subject in imagery and its association to the subconscious mind.

Secondly, the spiritual identities in my artworks are combinations of poetic insights to motion and reflections on the human condition. In this vain, my art requires more investigation of my use of symbols, composition and content. Aesthetically, the richness of color gives the viewer an insight to the beauty my paintings generally evoke. The familiarity of the landscapes in my art at times is odd, sometimes awkward; something that does not fit, something blank, mysterious and undecipherable that draws the whole story in itself or to itself. Also, while prophesying my point in the same vein my paintings put the audience in an uncanny moment of seeking out more behind the "hidden" messages or symbols. The public may want to deeply investigate my thought pattern in terms of aesthetics and overall content.

The works in this series are discoveries and a creative process from the "autobiography becoming the iconography" and in search of seeing the image as a new invention or archetype. Much like an epic motion picture, my paintings attempt to bring about a dialogue in sensitivity which will evoke feelings of the spiritual at
work. With symbols or symbiotic images, I want to produce a distinct language in narrative form that has literary, poetic, or narrative content. This is the basis of my
surreal paintings - constantly searching for and needing the audience to identify with.

With titles like Rise of the South, I got my ‘Mo-Jo' back, and Requiem for a Nigga,my recent series of work focuses on a more autobiographical search for my past
(i.e., childhood stories and cultural references to my region, the Deep South). This is my new environment, my new landscape and, like many great Americanpainters and storytellers, I am obsessed with the notion of revealing the source, strength, and mysticism of the South.

Media

Schedule

from November 18, 2010 to January 15, 2011

Opening Reception on 2010-11-18 from 18:00 to 20:00

Artist(s)

Keith Duncan

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