Night Moves

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Press Release

Claudia Keep
Night Moves

April 22–June 5, 2021

MARCH is pleased to announce our first solo presentation of works by Claudia Keep, a collaborative online exhibition with LA-based writer and photographer Tag Christof. At the gallery’s invitation, Christof recently traveled across the Western United States with Keep’s paintings in tow, installing her works at sites of his own choosing: roadside locales, neon diners, and amid wild landscapes. The resulting images create complex, universal scenes that invite reflection on notions of displacement, transience, and belonging. 

Each evening as the last glow of sunlight sinks beyond the curve of the earth, things begin to quietly change. Dimming heather skies draw our eyes upwards, stretching our crooked spines. Creatures crawl out from the shadows, moths guided by warm winds and artificial light. The moon scales the horizon, visible from the driver’s seat, the kitchen window, the forest’s edge, the top of a skyscraper, the heart of the desert.

Claudia Keep’s paintings reveal a humble shift, taken for granted yet familiar to all. Plentiful light turns precious, shadows that were once accents now frame each view: a road that could be here or there, a crimson sunset over familiar silhouettes, the spare room where we once spent a sleepless night. Things shift in and out of focus, attention drawn to what was previously superfluous. The unnoticed grows interesting in vacant time. In this time of obscurity are moments of clarity. Here are honest scenes. 

Preservations of otherwise transient moments, Keep’s work embraces the unremarkable. Her interest lies in what goes unnoticed, illuminating a broader view. These impressions capture the charged nature of ordinary scenes, an electricity created by those who have already visited, and maintained by those who have yet to arrive. Keep delivers this awareness with a kind of emotional realism, using simple methods to evoke the quiet thoughts one feels in private, forgotten moments. Reality is far more mysterious than the elaborate abstract and fleeting conceptual.

 Such works offer a moment of repose, a gentle pause in the most emotive of hours. It is easy to imagine future encounters and unfamiliar concepts, far more challenging to rest our focus on the here and now. Until we are still enough to witness subtle wonders, they remain unremarkable. Yet upon making these modest discoveries, we may come to recognize beautiful mundanities wherever we go. Like nightfall, they creep up on us.

 Claudia Keep (b.1993, Low Moor, Virginia) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.  Previous solo exhibitions include John’s Friends at Galerie Ulysses (Vienna, Austria) and A Day in Maine at the University of Kentucky Medical Center Gallery (Lexington, Kentucky) in 2019. Keep has also exhibited with The Painting Center (New York, NY), Auxier Kline (New York, NY) and Ablebaker Contemporary (Portland, ME). Keep has been represented by MARCH since 2020.

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