TheGallery’s 25 Years exhibition showcase – Ian McKeever: Against Architecture

McKeever’s site-specific installation, originally shown at Matt’s Gallery, London in 2017, is presented in a newly envisaged installation specifically made for the Upper Gallery at AUB. Using standard building materials, 3 x 2 stud walling timbers and sheets of plasterboard, often with the manufacturers’ markings left exposed, the artist creates what might loosely be called a labyrinth through the gallery. Making the space a provisional structure of passageways, cul-de-sacs and multiple viewing points.

Onto these raw and often only half-closed walls, McKeever has placed a series of small photographic-painted panels. In doing so he sets up an interplay between the specifics of space depicted or implied in the photographic-painted works and the broader space within the quasi-architectural structure that supports them.

"The proposition in the title of the exhibition – Against Architecture – suggests both proximity to its noun and variants within it. A claim to pictoriality is challenged, as much by the atomised formal structures McKeever adopts in the works themselves, as by the makeshift structures he hangs them on. The installation is an exploration of how the fragility of pictorial illusion subsists amid a world of contingencies. In a contemporary visual culture, in which images come cheap, the effect is to re-establish our sense of them as fugitive, mysterious and hard-won."

– Mark Prince