Each video is formally specific to the installation or performance that produced it. On the opening night of ‘Videos’ Keogh will deliver a new performance entitled ‘Knotweed’. Using collage, text and audio visual elements, ‘Knotweed’ is conceived as a performance as root system, rhizomatically binding together several strands of research on invasive species; landlord revenge; worker sabotage and foraged food trends. A video produced by this performance will be presented on one of the screens in Illuminations Gallery after the opening night.
In some instances the video was made to provide a non-objective document of the performance which happened on the opening night. ‘Four Fold’ was filmed live with a GoPro camera strapped to the artists chest. The slight fish-eye effect suggests the decapitated point-of-view of the ‘Old Croghan Man’, an image of which covered the floor of the space in the video. A similar strategy is used in ‘Integrated Mystery House’ where the lone inhabitant(played by Keogh) of a dilapidated interstellar ship appears in front of the camera. He is filming himself rehearse a frenetic presentation about his alterations to a huge defunct control panel. Through his discordant presentation to a hallucinated audience, disparate narratives and anecdotes are soldered together into a prototype for a new kind of integrated circuit. Both videos were made as formally considered meta-documents of the performances to be projected back into the installation for the duration of the exhibition.
Other videos are closer to stand alone works. ‘Taken Out of/Put into Oscar’s Bin’ (2013) for instance see’s Keogh deliver a patchy monologue to a disinterested audience outside a gallery opening. The monologue describes Oscar the Grouch through a constellation of fragments. His aspects are moulded through a series of tangential anecdotes, descriptions and lists, each unconnected to the last but forming a body through a description of its constituent parts. These various threads are matted together to present a textural impression of his form, tangled in the senses of the viewer.
Keogh’s work spans installation, sculpture, performance, drawing and collage. His installations often facilitate a performance which morphs sculpture into props and collage into mnemonic devices or surfaces to be read as visual scripts. These scripts take the form of dramatised, rambling monologues, densely packed with references to popular culture, politics, history, anecdotes and descriptions of physical and chemical processes.
Sam Keogh Born 1985, lives and works in Amsterdam/London/Co.Wicklow.
Selected Solo Exhibitions; Orbital Debris, 1646 Project Space, Den Haag, Netherlands, July 2018; Kapton Cadaverine, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, January 2018; Eurocopter EC135, Dortmunder Kunstverein, Germany, June 2016; Four Fold, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, May 2015 ; Mop, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, September 2013; Terrestris, Project Arts Centre, Dublin, July 2012; BABEL, Artlink Gallery, Buncrana, Co.Donegal, 2010. Selected Two/Three Person Exhibitions; The Mindful Intervention, Yin-Ju Chen, Tamás Kaszás, Sam Keogh, Kunstfort, Vijfhuizen, Netherlands, July 2018; Something III be Scared of, Sam Keogh, Linda Stupart, Joseph Noonan Ganley, no.w.here, London, February, 2018; Something II be Scared of, Sam Keogh, Linda Stupart, Joseph Noonan Ganley, Syndicate Gallery, Cologne, April 2017
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