Josh Keyes - Toxic Playground
Over the past twenty years Josh Keyes has been making paintings expressing a satirical and often ominous point of view of environmental issues, and the underlying destructive impulses that reside in the human condition. His work often includes post-apocalyptic themes, sometimes venturing toward surrealism, as a way of telling these stories in a way that is both personal and accessible.
His new body of work is an extension of these core ideas. Through conceptual process, work, and reflection Keyes work has grown to encompass new forms and materials. The topics and issues that interested the artist for this show encouraged a pull towards abstraction, humor and irony.
In seeking a new perspective that allows one to reshape and rename the world, seeing it anew, the artist delved into the tactile and physical experiences he has while spending time with the children in his life. His daughter, her cousins and playmates are at liberty to explore and interpret in ways that adult life doesn’t aways allow for or encourage. So it is in the language of play that this work has arrived.
