Underdonk

press release

May 15-June 27

Opening reception: May 15, 1 pm – 6 pm

Underdonk is pleased to present Making Faces, a two-person dialogue between Jared Deery and Steve Keister, curated by JJ Manford.

The exhibition will bring together Deery’s 100 Men with Beards project, and Keister’s Mesoamerican-inspired sculptural reliefs and constructions. Both artists employ the formality of the face, or figuration, as a template for material and spiritual transformation. Alternately inwardly focused, ferocious and serious, & also playful & jubilant, Making Faces is a complex personification of the creative process.

Deery’s 100 Men with Beards Project, inspired, in part, by Gerhardt Richter’s 48 portraits, in the artist’s words “attempt not to embrace or examine history, but to impossibly ignore it and be in the absurdity of the moment”. The project may be viewed on a macro level, as a wall of faces, while each painting also retains a micro sense of individuality, with delicate attention to detail, playful relationship to material process, and custom framing device. Hung in a chronological fashion, incremental formal and stylistic shifts between frames can be observed, bringing to mind a slow, meditative examination of the inner self.

Having spent several decades exploring constructivist materials and techniques, and formal abstraction, in the mid-90’s, Keister began making annual visits to Mexico to study PreColombian sites. Keeping this inspiration in mind, he would return to his home in NYC, with a keener awareness of the city’s detritus, sidewalks strewn with various geometric and vaguely anthropomorphic forms, such as styrofoam cartons that previously contained electronics. As the artist puts it, “I perceived a formal confluence between the empty cartons and Mesoamerican sculptural reliefs…soon enough I was making faces, so ubiquitous in Mesoamerican art, and the true test of my method: triangulation between transcendent ancient reliefs and the detritus of contemporary technology”. From there, his ever increasing skill in the art of casting & moldmaking techniques enabled him to utilize these discarded packing materials as a vocabulary of forms, curated for their resemblance to Mexican art.

Making Faces aims to display the chemistry between Deery and Keister’s work, activating both the wall and floor of Underdonk’s gallery space. While the imagery and formal devices range from the deeply personal, to culturally referential, the work of both artists retains a ferocious, ecstatic, and sometimes humorous expressive potency that feeds off of one another. The show’s title points to the idea that the face, while having the potential to be both seductive and repulsive, relaxed and intense, is merely the vessel for conveying the complex inner workings of the self.

Jared C. Deery has exhibited in Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, New York, Milan, and Berlin. He has participated in the Salone del Mobile in Italy and the Saint-Etienne Design Biennale in France. Born in Philadelphia in 1980, Deery moved to New York in 1997. He received his BFA with honors in 2001 from Pratt Institute and his MFA at Hunter College in 2009. He is in private collections in New York, Chicago, Denver, Japan, and Italy. His work explores ideas around both memory and sensory perception. His paintings depict images of flowers that explore both visionary and the metaphoric symbology where in which the flowers are the object or place where an abstraction takes place.

Steve Keister (b. 1949) is an artist based in New York City and he received his BFA and MFA from Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia. He has received awards and grants from John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grant, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship. His work is in the collection of The Museum of Contemporary Art, LA, Miami Art Museum, Hood Museum, Harvard Art Museum, Portland Art Museum, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, NY, and many more.