MAUREEN
KEAVENY
SLIP at Grease Gallery at GCADD, Granite City, IL /// 2026
Solo Exhibition
The fragments in ‘Slip’ do not read as parts of a whole awaiting assembly. Alien eyes without a face, a torso without limbs, a spine hung with plastic that all describe a body moving simultaneously forward and backward, shedding differentiation instead of acquiring it. This is de-evolution treated as a formal principle, producing shapes closer to root systems or larval states than to any finished creature. The hybridity at work here is not a fusion of two things into something new. It is the seam left visible where mineral, animal, and mechanical have not yet been sorted into separate bodies.
Each material stages its own failure to hold. Surfaces split along the lines where they were once pulled taut. Metal oxidizes and sheds itself in flakes across the floor. Curtains function not as walls sealing a room but as thresholds a body must part to pass through. Containment is proposed and then immediately given up. The exhibition does not depict the instant a boundary breaks. It holds the after-state of a break already underway and still unfinished.
Three kinetic works move only when approached, which places the audience inside the mechanism rather than outside it. A creak, a reversal of spin, a strike of bells against a wall accompanied by flickering light: none of these is autonomous. Each is a response summoned by proximity, closer to a nervous system's reflex than to a program executing on schedule. The distance between the one looking and the one performing collapses.
Nothing in the room illustrates a decision made in advance. The forms accumulated the way unbidden images surface from beneath conscious thought, followed rather than directed toward a conclusion. This is why the exhibition resists a single legible narrative, and why nature, psyche, and the artificial share equal footing rather than a hierarchy. Branch, copper fitting, and cast skin all carry the same charge.
The works are presented as arrivals rather than illustrations, things that have traveled from elsewhere and have not yet been translated into a familiar order. Meaning drifts and accumulates residue without resolving. The exhibition holds this unassimilated state, asking only the viewer's presence, and the motion it triggers, to make the work briefly known.
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DICHOTOMIES at Dissonant Works, St. Louis, MO /// 2025
Artist-in-Residence Solo Exhibition
Dichotomies is a project born from disruption. It is an attempt to fracture the image so that its former identity becomes only a remnant. The works begin with photographs of the desert, once captured as singular, stable records of place. Through a series of digital manipulations and physical rearrangements, the original reference dissolves. The images come from the world but no longer belong to it. The remains become unpictured and non-images. They are now hybrid terrains, suspended between nature and simulation, memory and the uncanny.
The installation emphasizes fragmentation across both image and space. Large intact prints confront each other on opposing walls, suggesting a binary architecture. Smaller prints, once a single image, have been split in two and one half is placed far from its counterpart, separated across the room. The viewer instinctively tries to reconcile these fragments, stitching them together in “memory space.” But the mental reconstruction is flawed. It is an imagined whole that never matches the physical reality. A gap persists, both optical and cognitive.
A further tension arises from an insistent formal binary in that some images are contained within visible borders, held in and framed while others are printed full-bleed, pushing outward as if resisting containment. The oscillation between confinement and overflow amplifies the instability of meaning.
Viewers often call the work “otherworldly.” The eeriness lies not in fear but in ontological instability in which the sense that once-familiar landscapes have slipped loose from certainty.
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INDEFINITE in Warrenton, MO /// 2023
A two-person exhibition by Zac Nelson and Maureen Keaveny
It wanders around the edge of an invisible boundary that depicts the phases of entropy and regeneration as they phase in and out. These shifting moments are imbued with a sense of the liminal, capturing a strange and indescribable sensation that defies definition. Time displaces a sense of belonging. The psyche morphs into earth, into detritus and becomes intertwined in shifting forms. What is left is a practice, a rite of passage, leaving markers in the path of the indefinite.
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Flicker @ Bunker in Silico, St. Louis, MO /// March 2022
Solo Exhibition
An encounter with something else that moves like a flame in quickly changing forms of light and dark. Something abject and something sublime. The edges of understanding and an uncanny sensation. A wry smile showing that a change in situation is slightly absurd. Flimsy realities abound. A chuckle and a groan.
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we're aliens / trying to understand paintings of bison /// 11-25-2020 until indefinitely
Artists: Bergman & Salinas, Joseph Greer, Daniel Glendening, Maureen Keaveny, Mikko Kuorinki, Hanna Umin
Curation: Patrick Durka & Kalaija Mallery
An exhibition of artworks in abandoned trailers at Stansbury Island of the Great Salt Lake, UT. Some of the works were disappeared or mysteriously mutilated shortly after. Images and footage gathered from the days of and after installation.
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ReVerb @ Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Los Angeles, CA /// June 30 - July 22, 2018
Artists: Clint Campbell, Maureen Keaveny, Nick Rodrigues, Peter Segerstrom
Curation: Kari Reardon
Press Release: Here
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On Tuesday March 8th, 2011, LUX by MAUREEN KEAVENY opens it's doors at THE FREE CHURCH. 7 pm
Lux is a measure of intensity and illumination.
Following the vehement voices from the land of feverish deserts, vast ruffled oceans, lofty mountain peaks, M.K. roused and disturbed, traveled high and low, seeks a sparkling cognizance, freshly, taking up sanctuary amongst the congregation of light and life. (Or: Maureen Keaveny recently relocated from Providence, RI to Los Angeles, CA after completing her MFA in Photography at The Rhode Island School of Design in 2007)
And starting at 9 pm !!
HIGH WOLF (w/ SUN ARAW)
M. GEDDES GENGRAS
THE URXED
ALPINE DECLINE
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THE FREE CHURCH
749 N. Avenue 50
Los Angeles CA 90042
>>---->publicfiction.org
LUX by MAUREEN KEAVENY
- 03/08/2011 to 03/17/2011
Doors are open Mondays & Wednesdays 7-10pm | Sundays 10am-12pm
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THE FREE CHURCH
Inspired by a rich history of cults and new religions in Los Angeles, as well as by the persistent trend towards spirituality in contemporary art and music, The Free Church of Public Fiction will open its doors from February 23rd to May 6th 2011.
Throughout the next three months, The Free Church will host a series of installations, cult dinners, musical performances, rituals and ceremonies. The four walls of the space will be taken over by a set of artists, musicians and performers in turn. They will each become spiritual leaders of sorts and construct a new church out of the same frame.
In this city that cultivates eccentricities and theatricality, religion is a customizable term. The "Free Church" is a name inspired by Thomas Jefferson's writing on the separation of state and faith; the foundation of this country. In this case, our church is free of government but also of religion itself; it is now a term re-opened to interpretation.
To all you scribes and artists and practitioners of magic through whom these spirits have been manifested...
Nothing is true.
Everything is permitted
-- Billy Burroughs
