Running across the basement galleries of the CCA, artist Sam Keogh (b.1985, Wicklow, Ireland) presents performances, ceramic sculptures and collaged drawings on paper, which draw on pre-modern motifs and myths of abundance.
The mediaeval myth of Cockaigne; a land of plenty in which food is abundant (it rains cheese), work abolished, and sexuality liberated features in both verse and visual traditions; most powerfully for Keogh in Bruegel the Elder’s painting The Land of Cockaigne, 1567, which shows three figures sprawled in a circular motif under a table bearing food and drink in a rural idyll.
Keogh mines this image for its utopian radicalism at a time of strict feudal power relations and peasant revolt. The fantasy of rest, pleasure and perpetual feasts depicted here might be read as an important contribution to a proto-communist imaginary. But Cockaigne is also a place where everything is cooked, and so closer to being dead than alive. The main figures are bloated, heavy and immobilised by their gluttony in this world of beige and brown where nothing seems to be growing, but instead slouches toward decomposition as time has slowed or stopped. In this sense, Bruegel’s The Land of Cockaigne can be read as a moralising warning to the ‘work-shy’, that they would end up in a pleasurable but stodgy purgatory rather than Heaven. Keogh see’s these contradictory elements of the myth as being part of its persistence as fantasy. Its qualities of nonsense and impossibility don’t amount to a workable image of a potential future world, but instead appeal to the libidinal or bodily desires of the audience – things which don’t need to be understood to function.
The exhibition will also include large collages from cut out drawings on paper. Keogh made these works as ‘cartoons’; 1:1 scale blueprints used by tapestry weavers to reproduce a design in silk. Cartoons were often worked into, cut up and glued back together numerous times before the artist was satisfied with the composition. The ‘Lady and the Unicorn’ tapestries made in 15th century Flanders are an important point of departure for Keogh’s collages. The original meaning of the tapestries’ complex system of allegorical symbols is lost, but they are thought to depict the five senses, plus a sixth. The main figures of the tapestries are surround by the millefleur (‘thousand flowers’) motif made up of multiple plants in simultaneous fruit and bloom – time and space again collapsed into an image of abundance.
Together, the physical elements of the exhibition form a phantasmagorical garden of abundance and suspended time, blossoming with images of worried cartoon clocks; sloths; inhalers; videogame avatars; duvets; unicorns and roast chickens that fly into your open mouth. The sculptures and collage will serve as backdrop and props in a performance which pull these ideas through each other in a tangled monologue, extending Keogh’s use of objects, images and speech to create environments that coagulate memory, narrative, and history.
SAM KEOGH Sated Soldier, Sated Peasant, Sated Scribe
17th Sep–12th Dec 2021 GOLDSMITHS CCA
About the artist
Sam Keogh (b. 1985, Co. Wicklow, Ireland) works across collage, drawing, sculpture, performance and installation. In recent work, Keogh has built intricate environments in which live performances unfold. These installations incorporate collage, small sculptures and found objects which spillover with idiosyncratic detail and extraneous information; shifting between artwork made by Keogh, props used by the performer and ambiguous technologies made by the characters in the universes he constructs. In this indeterminate space, materials, memories and affects begin to smudge into each other until a sticky cognitive map begins to emerge.
Keogh received an MFA from Goldsmiths College in 2014 and completed the Rijksakadmie residency in Amsterdam in 2017. Recent exhibitions include: Cosmopolis #2, Centre Pompidou, Paris; Knotworm 15th Lyon Biennial; Integrated Mystery House, Eva International, Limerick; Kapton Cadaverine, Glasgow International; Orbital Debris, 1646, The Hague; Eurocopter EC135 Dortmunder Kunstverein, Germany.
