Keith Walsh-ART
SELECTED ARTIST STATEMENTS
Long Beach City College installation detail, 2015
2012
The Stealth Space work engages the dialectic between the near and far, and what is mediated versus seen and experienced through the body. Stealth Space is about different perceptions of space and time mediated by the inhabitable Stealth Vehicle sculpture and its related two-dimensional work within the gallery context. The conceptual premise of the Stealth Vehicle sculpture is that any space existing beyond its own physical limits is deemed as ‘outer space’-- hence positioning itself in relation to the sensibility of the gallery as a ‘non-site.’ The image sources for many of the space collages are super-close up photographs of the materials used in The Stealth Vehicle. The gallery, along with a participant’s engagement, acts as an instrument to facilitating connections to the beyond. Stealth Space is grounded in American secular progressivism of the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan’s sensibilities of mediated consciousness, and Space Age adventurism.
2025
My research-based artwork uniquely chronicles histories of the political Left in the United States. They visualize pro-democratic, anticapitalist, and anti-fascist struggles by diverse social and labor organizations and activists, and cultural producers. While my work seriously investigates the past, it moves steadily toward a new egalitarian future society.
It preserves and renews progressive histories and relationships in this reactionary era of political oppression and scrubbing of data and real, lived history. Many of these histories are under-recognized and have been suppressed by mainstream media and cultures. The source documents are dispersed far and wide across multiple platforms and situations, thus requiring months and years of effort to process, interpret and re-present. Art making is a unique and anticapitalist endeavor that visually renews these histories while connecting them to our political and cultural present.
My art work draws upon the facts and legacies of political organizational histories, revolutionary material cultures, socioeconomic data, labor history, judicial and legislative documents, and art history. The compositions and textual aspects of my work are to a great extent directed by the history itself. Visual relations are meant to bring a viewer closer to an understanding of political relations and meanings. Art exists at the center of our social matrix due to its independent fluidic movement among social realms. It has the capacity to illuminate social and aesthetic nuances not found in primary documents or other mediated matter. This fluidity is reflected in the different modes of my practice: charting, interpolating with historical information and ephemera, activist portraiture, rhetorical analyses, future-oriented pieces, and sited engagements.
2008
The “CAB” sculptures reflect my interests and research into Neoclassical and Visionary continental architecture and furniture, and how these grammars filtered into 20th Century American lexicons of auto design, modernist sculpture, sci-fi spacecraft, and military architecture.
Generated in the post- 911 context, the CABS translate all these influences into new forms. Their hand-polished pearl white exteriors were chosen for a luxury car-like quality, a sense of dignity, a superficial lightness that complements the object's heavy physical weight, and its ability to elicit utopian associations. Each sculpture may be encountered as an expanded or closed object, thus exploring associative realms of the holistic, transforming, or ruptured container. Parallel to auto design prototypes the sculptures suggest functionality and question it at the same time. As unique objects both design prototypes and the CABS are autonomous, existing at the core of any symbolic or potential re-production.
The CABS filter our post-911 attitudes back into form itself. In a back-to-the-future manner, I was particularly intrigued by Democratic philosophies and the proportional logics of the human body that were embedded into the formal grammars of ancient Greek and Roman Classicism. Classicism and its descendent Neoclassicism have, however, mixed historical legacies. While their forms may embody ideals of honor, civic virtue, and democracy, they also symbolize autocratic political power, personal luxury, and ostentation. Classicism strangely accommodated for all of these philosophical manifestations through its own form of entropy-- the poetic tragedy.
Weekend installation, Los Angeles, 2011