jenny keane!
artist's statement
‘The body is a most peculiar ‘thing’, for it is never quite reducible to being merely a thing;
nor does it ever quite manage to rise above the status of thing.
Thus it is both a thing and a nonthing, an object, but an object which somehow contains or coexists with an interiority,
an object able to take itself and others as subjects, a unique kind of object not reducible to other objects.’
Elisabeth Grosz
Fear and Desire are the two ends of the same thing. If you are afraid of being hurt, then you desire not to be hurt.
Fear of death is a desire for life. Jenny Keane’s practice involves the uncontrollable paradigms of fear and desire.
The work tries to encapsulate a play between distance and intimacy,
subject and object, self and Other. Keane generally tries to evade or
subvert narrative through repetition or distraction. Duplication has
become re-enactment and fear of the new. Compulsive repetition becomes
a way of gaining power over the disjointed and vacillating world, and
our likenesses are as fragmented as our lives. Self–portrait is
an example of both a Narcissistic culture and of duplication; this
‘likeness’ seems to be a hopeless attempt to recreate the
self. The connections we make between body and mind, the idea of the
way we are perceived, the way we believe we appear to others, and of
the way we actually are, is examined in the work.
Abjection and the Uncanny have been very influential in Keane’s
practice, as has Feminist thought as well as theories of Language and
Psychoanalysis. An important element is looking at Lacan’s idea
of language being based on lack, a compensation for giving up the
imaginary world of desire (with the mOther) and the subsequent fetish
becoming the disavowal of this lack. The work has always had references
to contemporary visual culture, and the most important influence is
society’s fascination with Horror Films. The theorist Barbara
Creed discusses the horror film as ‘constantly restaging the
threat and rejection of the feminine’. Images of blood, vomit,
faeces, hair, etc. are central to our socially/culturally constructed
notions of the horrific. Yet, as a child, they were natural experiences
without disgust or fear.
Keane explores things that we are able to relate to – but not
completely – so that a moment of disorder occurs, creating a
sense of ambiguity and yet dialogical familiarity. The work tries to
present those gaps; unconscious ‘inappropriate’ thoughts,
body language and expressions in a larger than life, infinite and
persisting loop.