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 maps and chronicles histories of the political Left in the United States. They visualize radical, pragmatic, humanist and democratic struggles and traditions by multi-racial and multi-cultural social and labor organizations, grass roots political activists, artistic and organizational cultural producers.
My project is galvanized by solidarity and the quest to preserve progressive histories and relationships in our increasingly reactionary political epoch. Many of these histories are already under-recognized or have been previously suppressed by mainstream political cultures. Additionally, these histories, whether held on online platforms, books or archives are dispersed far and wide, requiring exceptional time and effort to aggregate, process, interpret and re-present. I am bringing them visually and informationally forward in time--relevant into our political and cultural present. In brief, I spend months and years accumulating and reviewing material before anything emerges onto drawing paper.
Compositional dynamism, schematic organizations, color palette, imagery, text arrangements, and selected drawing media are important formal elements that bring a viewer closer to a political meaning of form and relationships. These formal qualities are grounded to my selection and historical interpretations of facts: information from sociopolitical, economic and class-based economic theory, political organizational, labor, judicial, revolutionary, liberation, and cultural sources, as well as democratic and Constitutional theory. As a scholarly inquiry and cultural object art exists at the center of our social matrix. Due to its fluidic movement among social realms, it has the unique potential be an independent agent for progressive purposes. It has the capacity to tease out social and aesthetic nuances that cannot be found in primary documents. Much of this aforementioned fluidity is reflected in the visual formats and modes of my practice--diagramming, list-making, interpolating with historical information and ephemera, systemic color field maps, activist portraiture, flyers, rhetorical analyses, future-oriented pieces, and site-oriented propaganda.
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- 911context, 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 are the products of our post- 911era, filtering our attitudes 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