Home > Past Exhibitions > 1990 > Shelagh Keeley

Shelagh Keeley Flesh of the Body (1990) steel, wax, graphite, pigment, oil stick 1414 Monterey, 2nd floor Seven large steel panels are hung on the walls of one room. The panels, thin and flexible, drape at floor level. Body organs are drawn on them with an oil stick in a rusty shade of red-brown. The panels are rusting around the oily lines, the rust blending with the color of the drawn lines. In an adjacent room, walls are covered with graphite, wax, and vaseline. A tall, rusted table is covered with wax replicas of body parts. They are ex votos which are sold outside Spanish and Mexican churches to represent the body part which may be in need of healing. The models include ear, breast, foot, tongue, heart. "The room is a container, as is the body; the walls are its skin. Considering the fragility and vulnerability of our own viscera, the externalization of body organs and bone structure is a revelation -- the public display of a private mystery, an emotional landscape." Shelagh Keeley Born Oakville, Ontario, Canada, 1954, lives and works in New York