Johanna Keogh MFA
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Painting

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Oops! Out of Bounds
Transgressing Social Boundaries                  


Icons


Portraiture


Conversations

The origins of this project stemmed from an exhibition at the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, called “Conversations”.  The concept was an image/text piece based on nine short poems written by Robert Mintz.  The paintings by Keogh picked up the main thread of the series, finding the emotional core of the work as a love story, set in nineteen forties France at war. 

Poetic references to film noir and the painting “Liberty”, indicated wartime.  Making the paintings into a series of storyboards played up the sense of a story.  The use of the expression “So long,” instead of goodbye, triggered the concept of forties film.  The guy was therefore an American because the expression was characteristic of forties era American film in such uses as “So long buddy,” and being an American in wartime France, was a G.I.

The woman perpetually wears a red dress, emblematic of love.  It focuses attention on her and works as a visual ploy to show it’s the same person from frame to frame.  Picking up on cinematic devices used during that age, enables it to be suggestive with the dress taken off, hanging over the screen, 

Eventually the romance ends and the woman drowns her sorrows in a drunken stupor.  People in film of that epoch, especially romantic leads were presented with a high level of perfectionistic gloss.  Even in their most dross moments, they seldom became scowling hags.  The unexpected candour brings humour even though she manages to maintain a polished  level of glamour and beauty.




Hindu Triptych

Commissioned by Professor Lynn A. Stout.  



Mother


Golden Pagoda

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All works copyright Johanna Keogh 2019