Dennis Keeley
Dennis Keeley works as an artist, photographer, teacher and writer. His photographs have been exhibited in numerous solo and group shows. He has been commissioned by the California African American Museum, and has works in the permanent collections at LACMA, MOCA, the J. Paul Getty Center Trust, Conservation and Research Institutes among others. Keeley has worked with the J. Paul Getty Conservation Institute for twenty years.
See more of Dennis Keeley's work here
About the Botanical Print Series:
a sense of time, place and space
In December 2012, after a particularly difficult period with work, what started with a few drought resistant potted plants strategically placed around the door to my darkroom, turned into a garden that helped me find peace of mind. I never gardened and never even thought about gardening, but in 1997 I was commissioned by the J. Paul Getty Center to document the construction of the Central Garden, working with Robert Irwin. The project was equal parts environmental installation, art intervention with space and light, sculpture and personal expression, combined to support the center’s visitors with a place of reflection. While working on this project I saw Irwin work, play, rework, and take some big conceptual and aesthetic leaps.
I am not sure in the beginning of 2013 that I consciously remembered how happy the Getty project made me, but in that Christmas break from school, my backyard began a transformation that hasn’t ceased. The daily physical labor of hauling countless bags of soil and moving hundreds clay pots of every size around, visiting almost every nursery in Southern California and talking with arborists, botanists, landscape designers and all the lovely people at Home Depot helped put my life and work back on track, but with a new awareness of space and time.
I made annual retreats in the desert for decades in order to think, walk, and make photographs. The desert is a place that some find remote, but in speaking with several Native Americans, they explained that the desert does not need people to give it meaning. It is a place that is abundantly populated with all the things it requires to be what it is.
There is a shift in time that happens when one stops wearing a watch. I have spent time in the arctic wilderness during the summer, when the sun continually revolves in a circle, never rising or setting. It made me rethink about how we customarily measure time.
What began with an inexplicable and unprecedented level of daily commitment to my little backyard oasis, developed into a heightened sense of observation with respect to the affect that the elements and seasons had on each plant, in each place, and the amount of time it had in the sun. This experimentation with time to water, time to weed, time to sit and watch and wait, has brought me a more timeless sense of place and a gratifying peace of mind.
These days I am rescuing abandoned plants from neglected yards, cutting and replanting desert cacti, and saying Yes and Thank You to people who offer plants that need a good home. Almost every pot or plant in my backyard has a story. I began and continue to make my pictures a short walk from my backdoor. I heard my friend and artist, Linda Croft, say neatly, “We either make art from the world or we fabricate art from ourselves for the world.” I would like to think this work is a bit of both. The vantage point of photography is not only the picture you see, but infers a personal observance of process, structure and circumstance. I am not an artist as much as art is the lens I observe everything through. Art provides a curious ability to see a specificity of condition. It sets the stage, asks a question, reveals a mystery, references something familiar or introduces the promise of something new. These are the questions, insights and inspirations that inform my work.
It all begins to come together when we begin to learn more about ourselves, our time and the world.
Our sense of time, place and space is actually an emotional mapping of ourselves and that personal connection to the world. Not necessarily tied to a specific location, or destination, but more like an understanding and acceptance that time, place and space can actually be in the end what defines us.
-Dennis Keeley
From my garden
San Pedro, California
2020
