The Valdez Museum is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Mythical Creature Mythical Place, featuring artwork by Cordova artist Denis Keogh. Exploring a wide variety of media and iconography, Keogh’s body of work has a theme of exploration done by a fictitious explorer in a fictitious place, creating a loose narrative with many direct parallels to life and history as we know it. Some images will be made directly from photos, some from life, and most will be drawn from imagination.
Born in the Midwest, Denis Keogh hitchhiked to the deep West during the uranium boom of the 1950s. After that glowing experience he took up careers as: a laborer, building tunnels through mountains: a river rat, floating boats through tunnels in mountains and: an artist, painting images of boats floating through tunnels in mountains. He moved to Alaska in 1979, and has lived in Cordova since 1982. He continues to make art that has exploration as a theme. Keogh works in a wide variety of media and techniques. Common themes throughout Keogh’s work include exploration, entropy, and man’s place within his environment.
About his work, Keogh writes, “My artwork is about place, where we reside and how that place resides in us. I am drawn to ruins. People, things we make, and places that time has exacted a toll on serve as reminders of both the reality of timeless elements alive in the here and now as well as the mythic quality of our lives, the stories we continually build up and tear down.
“Relying on direct observation and the subconscious, I strive to interpret the landscape and some of the characters inhabiting it. Private narratives occur while in the process of creating images and accompany them and grow with them until the image is complete. Afterward they are often lost or lose import, leaving the image as a residue of the experience.”
The exhibition runs January 15 through March 13, 2016. An opening reception, free for museum members, will be held at the museum on Friday, January 15, 6 PM – 8 PM. Refreshments will be served.
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