Circulatory (Head to toe)

Matt Keegan is a Brooklyn-based artist whose work addresses the complexities of language and cognition, and is often informed by personal narratives that illuminate larger socio-political histories.

Part of a collage-based group of works, Circulatory (Head to toe), 2019 is made from pre-existing mass-produced material – advertising coupons and leaflets dropped in front of the artist’s studio. Commercial images serve as tools for learning, archival material, and stand-ins for purported everyday needs. Tied to the subject of image-based communication—foundational to our present-day condition—Keegan examines ways in which meaning is produced through his selected photographs. Incorporating the language of advertising as his main point of reference, Keegan re-enacts and reanimates his sources by shifting them away from their initial context, frequently resulting in humor and satire. While language and cognition have been crucial to the work of Matt Keegan, subject formation has occupied an equally important role in his practice. The work highlights the limitless scale of the contemporary image archive, but also, the way subjects are shaped by this material.

Keegan’s work has been widely exhibited internationally in venues including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New Museum, Bard CCS Hessel Museum (all New York), The Kitchen, Sculpture Center, the Guggenheim Museum (NY, Bilbao and Berlin), Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Grazer Kunstverein (Graz, Austria), ICA Boston, the Columbus Museum of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Henry Art Gallery (Seattle), and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts (Cambridge, Mass) where his 2016 video Generation, traveled after its 2017 debut at Participant Inc., in NYC. Keegan's first monograph, OR, was co-published by Inventory Press in conjunction with his 2015 solo show, "Portable Document Format" at Rogaland Kunstsenter, Stavanger, Norway. Keegan is the co-founding editor and publisher of North Drive Press (2004-2010) and founding editor of == (2012 and 2016). His work is represented in numerous museum and private collections worldwide, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, The Annette and Peter Nobel Collection, Zurich, The Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art at Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida.