In Collaboration with Jeff Keithline
Feet Up
Installation detail
May 4, 2011 — June 5, 2011
Gallery Talk Sunday, May 8 at 3pm
Opening Reception Sunday, May 8, 4pm – 5pm
About the Exhibit
Artist and independent curator Elizabeth Keithline explores the relationship of technology and nature, the implication being that both promote human evolution, making us become smarter, faster, and higher. In a mixed media installation, full-scale human figures are frozen at various levels of motion: some crawl, walk, and run through the gallery. Other figures converge upon a central pool of monitors, drawn to this technology as an opportunity for self-reflection and self-absorption, an advantage as well as an obstacle.
“Simply by opening a laptop we create the potential to increase our mental capacity,” she has stated. “However, as far as we may seem to have come from our roots in the natural world, technology mirrors nature.”
Keithline’s sculptures are unique, stemming from a process she has developed over two decades called the “lost box” technique. Originally the process entailed wrapping and weaving heavy-gauge wire around wooden forms that were subsequently burnt away. Keithline’s method has since evolved. The figures in Smarter / Faster / Higher are made by weaving wire around mannequins, forming an intricate mesh. The woven wire is then cut and peeled away from the mannequin and sculpted by Jeff Keithline, creating a new entity while retaining the intrinsic ‘memory’ of the now lost object.
Keithline curated A Tool Is A Mirror for the Boston Cyberarts Festival as a complimentary group show to Smarter / Faster / Higher. Featuring work by artists Aerostatic, Sheila Gallagher, Dennis Hlynsky, Brian Kane, Duncan Laurie, Rupert Nesbitt, and Erik Sanner, A Tool Is A Mirror is on view at Mobius Gallery in Boston from April 22 – May 8, 2011, before traveling to the Danforth Museum of Art from May 8 through June 5, 2011.
About the Artist
Elizabeth Keithline received a B.S. in Communications from Emerson College and has studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and the Saunderstown Weaving School. Her work has been exhibited at New York University, E32, the Newport Art Museum, Real Art Ways, the Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit, the Fuller Museum, the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, the Waiting Room, New Orleans, Craft Alliance, St. Louis, and others. Keithline has curated Providence Art Windows, The Shadow Show, the Apartment At The Mall, and most recently, A Tool Is A Mirror, currently at Mobius in Boston. For more information, please visit elizabethkeithline.com.