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| Peter Culley Shelagh Keeley Presentation House, North Vancouver, April 4 - May 4, 1986 Vanguard, Vol.15 #4, September 1986. [ 681 words ] Though Shelagh Keeley's Gestures of the Body / Gestures of the Site is preserved for us by Robert Keziere's excellent catalogue photographs, it still seems odd to be discussing a work of art that no longer exists. The most ephemeral urban graffito can achieve the aura of holy writ as it sits, as if undisturbed for centuries, against walls one passes every day. The limited temporality of this work is a given, and thus becomes an event referred to, entering thereby not only the discourse of painting and installation, but of performance. Keeley's understanding of the performative element in her work is emphasized by the catalogue, which also documents the process of the installation. Bespectacled and intense, Keeley is, in these photographs, the image of the heroic artist. The scale of this work is certainly heroic. Against three large white walls of Presentation House were applied a gelatinous ground of red pigment, wax and vaseline, suggestive of dried blood, out of which emerged the darker painted figures of disembodied parts: tongues, teeth, an ear. Across one wall was a series of photographs taken at a screening of Mizoguchi's Demon Pond. On the other walls were aquarium photographs of turtles and what I took to be whales, which was confirmed by the large drawn figure of a whale that was detached from the main group. In this and other works Keeley seems to feel that her role as an artist is an intermediary between the interior of the body and the exterior of site. This position, with its expressionistic overtones of sexuality and transgression, places her within many current trends in painting. However, her relationship to site as gesture and temporal event brings to her argument the question of performance. It is the minefield between these positions that Keeley attempts to traverse, and, as in all similarly heroic positions, it becomes only a matter of to what degree that position is compromised by the vicissitudes of practice. That a gesture repeated becomes a style is a fact of life for all artists, and after a certain point careers are judged both by their fidelity to the strategies that established them and by the ability to question, change, and develop those strategies. Keeley's earlier installations were well documented in a set of photographs displayed in a room adjacent to the main gallery, and are described in the catalogue. The shift of emphases her installation work has undergone becomes evident here. The earlier installations drew more widely: from mythology, literature, film and her personal and political observations of Africa. The distance between artist, material and expression is all but effaced, and the works have a crude power that belies their sophistication. Relationship to site was less formalized; a friend's wall or a hotel room rather than a gallery. That the later work has been decisively affected by its assimilation into mainstream galleries is beyond dispute. What is more problematic is the nature of this shift. What the work has lost in expressive power it has gained in purely pictorial values. The catalogue photographs can only suggest the beautifully visceral sheen of the walls and, despite their scale, the delicacy of the figure drawings. But the subversive and transgressive possibilities of Keeley's project are avoided, or at least muted. The use of photographs in this installation seemed to indicate a growing formalism of technique rather than an active concern within the work. The curiously formal Presentation House could well have contributed to this increased decorousness, proving that site-specificity is a sword that can cut both ways. If this installation can be seen as a refinement, a realistic adjustment to the conditions of a career, it can also be seen that the implicit subversion of Keeley's position — that the body is the spontaneous actor and medium of the work — can hardly be well served by such accommodations. Vanguard, Vol.15 #4, September 1986. Text: © Peter Culley. All rights reserved.
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