The Power Plant

At the core of Shelagh Keeley’s work is a drawing practice based on an intuitive and embodied response to readings and research in poetry, politics, cinema, and architecture. The artist applies the same approach to her work with film, where the moving image becomes a drawing notebook, a travel journal, an opportunity to bring the viewer into the spaces experienced by the artist and mediated through the lens of the hand-held camera.

Since 1985, Keeley has documented on film her encounters with gardens and uniquely built environments around the world. The resulting film notebooks quietly, yet poignantly, reveal the layered histories and contexts that created them at different moments in time. From the flamboyant artificiality of a desert oasis in Las Vegas to the discipline of a Zen Garden in Kyoto, and from a colonial garden in Lisbon to the largest European zoological-botanical garden in Stuttgart, the films invite us to contemplate the complexity and intangible essence–genius loci or spirit of the place–Keeley felt in these places. Filmed while walking for hours at a time as a flâneuse, the moving image notebooks present an invitation for the viewer to become the artist as she draws with the camera, investigating and uncovering visceral, hidden layers of these locations.

Presented in two programs for the duration of the exhibition, the film essays are accompanied by displays of printed materials that contextualize Keeley’s deep interest in the sites she documents while walking. Like her drawing practice, the films trace the artist’s journey and her continued effort in bringing forward the intricacies and contradictions of the world we live in.

About the Artist
Shelagh Keeley is a Toronto-based artist whose multidisciplinary work explores the socio-political histories hidden in our natural and built environments. Privileging slowness, Keeley’s intuitive conceptual practice involves the body and draws on instinctive intelligence. The artist has produced two works for The Power Plant’s Fleck Clerestory commissioning program: in 2014–2015, the site-specific wall drawing Notes on Obsolescence (now in the collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery) and in 2015 the photographic wall installation 1983 Kisangani Zaire, both of which formed part of the group show The Unfinished Conversation: Encoding/Decoding. Keeley’s recent projects have been presented by the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts; MoMA Archives and Library, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto; Vancouver Art Gallery; Ifa Gallery Stuttgart, Germany; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Tokyo Biennale, Japan; Stedeliijk Museum Schiedam, the Netherlands; the Getty Center, Los Angeles; the Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon, Portugal; and The Museum of Modern Art, Gunma, Japan, among many others.