Anne McKeown: With Out the Shelter of His Love

SOHO20 Chelsea is pleased to announce WITH OUT the shelter of his love, an exhibition of Anne Q. McKeown's new series of paintings.

McKeown's new paintings rely on intuition and planned conceptual processes while maintaining an awareness of perceptual information. Grids and systems are developed from current information and imagery from the canon of art history. The elements in the paintings are distilled from observation of social orders and power structures. With these studied sources the work is formed with chance; a hiding and altering of the work is the method of construction as it moves toward its being.

While the basis of the work is expressive, the paint is charted mechanically. Residual, traced marks reveal a plotting that nods to the world of science, to trial, error, and inquiry. The work appears to be analytical, not revealing the expressionism fueling its making. Color is also an important voice in the paintings for it communicates the tones and sounds that are filling the work.

The speed and overflow of information in the 21^st Century set a chaotic world stage in the paintings and rejects the sensibility of order. Crowding marks and shapes investigate the uneasy sense of the shifting world as systems and beliefs shred and burst into new compilations. There are bits of the familiar but those are hints and allusions. McKeown is not looking to create an order, rather to record a moment of being.

Anne Q. McKeown lives and works in Freehold, New Jersey. She is also the Master Papermaker at the Brodsky Center for Innovative Editions at the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. This is her first solo show at SOHO20 Chelsea Gallery.