Dublin
The Kerlin Gallery in central Dublin is a long, narrow, and tricky space that requires careful or clever handling. Sam Keogh, a young Irish artist exhibiting his first solo show there, worked that space extremely well. “mop” featured a considerable array of small, ground-based works, with Oscar the Grouch of “Sesame Street” fame occupying a central place, being at once the villain, muse, and scaffold of the show, both materially and conceptually. The entirety of the floor was covered with an enormous, collaged vinyl print depicting versions of Oscar, whose image surfaced and submerged amid a skillful flurry of dense marker, crayon, paint, and Photoshopped mark-making. Keogh placed a number of strange (and weirdly familiar) sculptural objects on top of this vinyl print, re-creating a world of re-appropriated and anxiously interconnected rubbish, tat, and pseudo-filth.…see the entire review in the print version of September’s Sculpture magazine.
