Amy Kim Keeler
Future Jupiter
July 18 - August 29, 2020
Installation View: Amy Kim Keeler, Future Jupiter
Lowell Ryan Projects is pleased to present Future Jupiter, a solo exhibition by LA-based artist Amy Kim Keeler. The show will feature sixteen of her intimately-sized works all hand-stitched in cotton thread on corrugated cardboard. For each, Keeler balances precision with intuition, speaking in a nonobjective vocabulary that emphasizes seriality, geometry, and gradation of color. Expansive and intimate, organic and mathematical, her work achieves a spiritualism both rooted in and transcendent of the natural world.
Keeler’s artistic practice grows out of the spiritual belief system Anthroposophy, a philosophical movement founded in the early 20th century by Rudolph Steiner that propounds inner development through imagination, inspiration, and intuition. Occupying a space between mysticism and empiricism, Anthroposophists believe that a person's every action, thought, and feeling directly impacts our collective future––a new condition of consciousness (defined by perfected imagination) called Future Jupiter, for which the exhibition is titled.
Through this lens, Keeler finds immense metaphysical weight and aesthetic beauty in even the most seemingly inconsequential of gestures: tree trunk patterns; rock and crystal formations; the flow of water, and the paths it carves. These are natural phenomena created over the course of hundreds and thousands of years, so out of sync with the human scale of time that it can be easy to forget that they are not fixed entities, but rather material in an ongoing process of creation.
In this same vein, Keeler engages her material gradually, discovering aesthetic potential through the slow, repetitive process of threadwork. Stitches are tiny, humble, disciplined gestures (so unlike a brushstroke); only by accumulation can they achieve an extraordinary coherence of textures, patterns, and movement. In this way, Keeler’s work can be thought of as the tangible result of “spiritual research;” the mundanity of her material, the natural rhythms of her process, and the organic precision of her form reverberate with and testify to the cosmic weight of our every individual gesture.
To believe this––that we are all co-creators of the future, always at work, often making infinitesimal marks––is both a hopeful and terrifying doctrine to live by. It installs every one of us at the helm of the ship that is our world, and while we get to steer our own path, that round-the-clock post vests us with massive responsibility. But that might be exactly what is needed at this moment in time: to do away with the deus ex machina “it’ll all work out” swagger, and to instead walk through life consciously abiding an individual duty to a future larger than anyone person.
Amy Kim Keeler was born in Los Angeles, CA where she currently lives and works. Keeler creates abstractions out of cardboard and fiber-based materials. Through a series of handmade stitches, patterns and shapes arise reminiscent of formations derived from nature—light and sound waves, striations in rock formations, waves casting back into the ocean at sunset. Informed by concepts in Anthroposophist philosophy and the explorations of Goethe, Keeler’s works acknowledge that only through a connection to natural rhythms and imperfections are we able to imagine, grow, learn and progress.
Keeler’s works have been exhibited at galleries and institutions including Fortnight Institute, New York, NY; A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, New York; San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles, San Jose, CA; and the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, Santa Ana, CA. Amy Kim Keeler has been a resident artist at Poco a Poco, Oaxaca, Mexico; and upcoming residencies include the Icelandic Textile Center, Blönduós, Iceland, and the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Deer Isle, Maine.
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