To reframe is to represent that which I have seen… to represent the process by which vision projects and transforms itself, to engage in the struggle to discover that which is absent, obscured from our vision, through an encounter with that which is manifest, given.

Sarah Charlesworth

The Approach is pleased to present Running Doggerel, the second solo exhibition by Caitlin Keogh at the gallery.

This group of twelve new paintings interpret a long, frieze-like collage. Keogh’s source material consists of thousands of art museum postcards, online search results, phone photos, and monograph reproductions. The collage is composed intuitively, with things loosely adhered and continuously moved during the process of translating into paint. Overall, the emphasis is on the studio as the site of reflection and production, rather than the materials’ narrative or historical importance. The paintings can be viewed as one large composition, discrete units, or smaller series.

The title Running Doggerel plays on a flexible mode of poetry made of uneven rhyming schemes, often associated with nursery rhymes and simple, common words. Keogh’s visual composition often loosely rhymes (a hand of a broken roman statue shadowed nearby with the waving hand in a Picabia illustration, for example) and the works’ cadence is established by things clustering together and drifting apart. Much of the imagery comes from familiar sources in the artist’s oeuvre, such as medieval marginalia, the 19th century aesthetic movement, fragmented classical statuary, Surrealist illustration, and 20th century anatomical diagrams; some motifs have appeared in Keogh’s previous paintings. The group of Correspondence Paintings feature postcards purchased at art museums or mailed to her from her friend and former art history teacher, M. Dorsch, tethered with passementerie into a thematic but modular painting object.

Keogh cites the proto-pop collages of Joe Brainard as an influence. As both artist and writer, he side-stepped distinctions of high and low, formal and casual, to make art objects that commemorated friendships, and he wrote diaristically of the associations between personal experience and material relics. Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas is another influence. In The Surviving Image:, Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms, Georges Didi-Huberman describes Warburg’s project as “an attempt to ‘pass through walls’: to ‘decompartmentalize’ the image and the time that it bears within itself or that bears it.” Similarly, the need to unsettle a historical narrative or ideology of a received image is central to Keogh’s practice. The visual patterns and disruptions of Running Doggerel are emphatically intuitive, playful, and predicated on the artist’s desire to encounter images as they seem to speak across time, reframed for new stories and meanings.