AUGUST 5 – SEPTEMBER 11, 2020

SOCO Gallery is thrilled to present an exhibition of new works by artist Holly Keogh. This will be the artist’s first solo exhibition with SOCO Gallery. Keogh creates small and large scale figurative paintings that focus on our relationship with memory and our desire to document or freeze time. The artist is first generation American and throughout her childhood photographs were mailed back and forth between family members in England. These photographs depict cousins’ birthdays she never attended or new homes she never visited.

“I examine the familiar faces in these images in vain; I can’t bring them any closer, I can’t reconstruct the original moments in time. My desire to capture the appearance of moments that keep retreating or disappearing, manifests itself in blurred, faded or distorted portraits. I treat the figures in these photographs as a starting point from which my own consciousness supplants the subject's personality. Psychologically charged portraits emerge    from tension between my will to remember and my power to project. With this treatment, the paintings arrive at something that is as familiar as it is open to interpretation; a combination of my equally imperfect memory.” (Holly Keogh, 2020)

In Towards Another Picture, Keogh was inspired by the video reels taken by her grandfather in the 1960s and 1970s. These silent moving images are filtered first through the lens of the artist's grandfather and then again through the artist as she extracts specific moments in time. In film there is the expectation of a linear narrative or a series of events. However, through painting the artist is able to distill these moments and omit the traditional plot or resolution. What remains is an image that remains open, aiming to evoke instead of conclude. The artist becomes the director and the audience becomes an active part of the development of the narrative as they bring their own personal history to each painting. Keogh is fascinated by seeing family members, including her mother, sailing or exploring the woods and cliffs of beaches in a time before she ever knew them. The tension between the familiar and the unknown is where she finds inspiration and authorship. 

The motion and blurry-ness of the paintings hint at the archives perpetually evolving, never stagnant nature. Light seems to emanate from behind the paintings conjuring the cinematic, light quality of TV and inviting the viewer to enter the scene. The artist's treatment of her family's archive highlights each generation's ability to comb our personal or cultural histories to shape and reshape our past. Her work is intuitive and experimental, aiming to create a sensory experience that brings awareness to how different mediums construct our reality.

HOLLY KEOGH (Charlotte, NC, B. 1991)

Holly Keogh (b. 1991, American) is an artist living and working in Charlotte, North Carolina. Her studies include a year at the University of Cape Town, South Africa in 2012 where she concentrated on painting before graduating from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte with her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. After graduation, she became an original member of the Goodyear Artist Collective where she had the inaugural artist residency. She is currently represented by SOCO Gallery in North Carolina and has exhibited with various galleries in the South East. In 2019 she was selected to participate in the Pienkow Artist Residency in Chelm, Poland where she was the recipient of the People’s Choice Award. Keogh was an artist-in-resident at the McColl Center for Art in Charlotte, North Carolina this spring.