Event Details
Join us on Thursday November 19 at 6pm CT for a virtual artist talk with Bram Keast. This artist talk is presented in conjunction with Playground Chitchat, a two-person exhibition of Keast’s and Neah Kelly’s work. Playground Chitchat is on view from October 30 – December 4, 2020.
Martha Street Studio is currently closed as of November 1, 2020. Please review our COVID-19 procedures in full here. Visit the exhibition page to view documentation of Playground Chitchat.
This artist talk is free to attend and open to the public. ASL interpretation will be provided for this event, courtesy of Arts AccessAbility Network Manitoba.
To access this virtual artist talk, join the Zoom meeting at 6pm on Thursday November 19 by clicking this link: https://zoom.us/j/95483289142 or by joining the meeting using this meeting ID: 954 8328 9142. You do not need to download Zoom ahead of time, but you may do so at https://zoom.us. This event will be recorded–please have your video turned off if you prefer not to be included in the recording.
Read mel monoceros‘ Spells Cast, a response to Playground Chitchat here.
Bram Keast is an interdisciplinary artist whose work engages with a visual realm of instability that offers itself to continuous reinterpretation. Working playfully with the legacies of minimalism and hard-edge painting, his work expands the visual field into a haptic experience felt through both sight and touch. Keast lives and works in Winnipeg and holds a BFA (Honours) from the University of Manitoba. His work has been exhibited in Canada and the United States and is part of several private collections across the world including ones in England. He is a board member of various Winnipeg arts organizations and is an art educator who teaches through workshops and private tutoring.
Keast’s work can be viewed online at bramkeast.com and on Instagram @wispwist.
The artist thanks the Manitoba Arts Council and Winnipeg Arts Council for their generous support.
Artist Statement:
Fourplay is a game where the rule is divergence. Start with four, what does that mean? Keep it simple to start. Make four shapes, any shape. How do I move forward from here? There is a disingenuous form in this arrangement, only something’s been added and I think I’ve miscounted. I’d better start over and make sure I’ve got all my marbles. I keep losing track but something feels right about this, I’m not sure why. It’s been a while, but perhaps it was in my pocket all along. I find myself sorting and connecting, grouping and collecting. Maybe there’s something I’m missing, although I’m not sure I’ll find it, so maybe I’ll have to force it. Maybe this isn’t such a good game after all.
Fourplay is a body of work that views itself as a puzzle where the goal is to not solve it, but rather to lose sight of the original puzzle and find itself playing some other game. These playfully experimental works explore relationships between print media, painting and sculpture through an eclectic collage-style assemblage of these individual mediums and materials. Inspired by game design, number games and musical polyrhythms, Fourplay approaches the idea of sets with irreverence and delights in creating, then interrupting sequences of four.
Adherence to a strictly faithful interpretation of “four” is less important than the discovery of how even this simple concept can slip away when examined closely. Repetition opens up a space where an active re-creation takes place, where “four” is re-interpreted and re-made many times over. In each re-assembly, something is lost and something is added, leading erratically from one stage to another as each new arrangement searches for cohesion.
