The Athenaeum is pleased to present Realia, an exhibition by New York-based artist Matt Keegan. The exhibition will be on display at the gallery from January 10 to March 22, 2025. An exhibition opening will be held at the Athenaeum on January 10 from 6pm to 8pm.  Due to inclement weather and UGA campus closure, the exhibition opening has been rescheduled to January 11 from 2 - 4pm.

The sculptures, collage, and paintings in Matt Keegan’s Realia are informed by a set of 400 double-sided image-based flash cards his mother made between the late 1980s to mid-2000s to teach English to high school and adult ed students. The cards feature cut up images from clothing catalogs, magazines, teacher union mailers, and other printed matter that came into their home. 

In Keegan’s interpretation, the images become part of an associative game of logic, pointing to the endless construction of codes, both symbolic and cultural. A newly commissioned tabletop sculpture, for example, presents familiar objects cast in aqua resin and then painted, drawn, and pigmented in various media to assert the objects’ colors and textures. These colored casts do not form a cohesive narrative and, in this way, prompt reflection on the associative and disjunctive nature of meaning. “Behind every image is another image” the postmodernist historian Douglas Crimp once said, and now Keegan might add, behind every word is another word in a complex and never-ending proliferation of meaning. 

Yet Keegan’s reflections on the production of meaning are not only wry. In his recent small-scale oil paintings, which recall the size and pictures from his mother’s teaching aids, the hand of the artist – itself, another signifier– is evident. At times clumsy, the representation of a photo of a door knob, a roll of paper towels, or a slide are stripped from their denotative function and acquire something more poignant: the entanglement of all these systems with subjectivity, memory, and meanings not found on flashcards. Thus, the works invite even more speculative readings, an expression of the language of imagination. 

About the artist

Matt Keegan is an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, NY. His work has been widely exhibited at venues including The Museum of Modern Art, (NY) earlier this year. He has presented solo projects at SculptureCenter (NY) and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts (Cambridge, Massachusetts), as well as two-person exhibitions with Kay Rosen at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and Grazer Kunstverein (Graz, Austria), in addition to various international group shows. His work is represented in public collections, including MoMA, NY; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, among others. His book, 1996, was published in 2020 by the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA). Keegan is a Senior Critic in the Painting and Printmaking Department at Yale University.