- Venue
- Showflat
- Location
- East England
To open the series of events: SHOWFLAT, http://www.showflat.org, artists have been invited to take part through exhibiting in their own homes. SHOWFLAT challenges the relationship between public and private for both artist and viewer as the artist presents their work in a very personal space and invites an interested public.
Keeble is multi-lingual, both a practice-based conceptual artist, and response-based artist, and “To Have and To Hold” was seated in suburbia, Southend On Sea: the winding residential streets with the detritus of balls and bicycles of young families gathering shadows at dusk. It’s not new: artists showing in their own homes to challenge the gallery scene, and Showflat takes up this challenge, but what is distinctive is the multifaceted stance that Keeble forwards: the notion of privacy in this context, the idealism of a protected and nurtured family life and how this has been challenged.
On 23rd September 2010 a wireless CCTV camera was erected by Southend On Sea police SMARTT team, outside Keeble’s home. Keeble had ” no idea who owned the camera or what it was filming… I set out to discover why the camera was installed and filming in a residential area. The only response I received was from Southend Council Housing Department who stated that it was owned by the SMARTT team and that they would be in contact with me to discuss it’s filming range… I am still awaiting a reply.”
Keeble presented her home, and staged a series of artworks: installation of figures, shrouded and foetal in the position of a child hiding in plain sight – if I can’t see you then you can’t see me… a CCTV camera presented as a glass-cased artefact reflecting and recording visitors to Keeble’s home; an amusing but disturbing proposition of camera as part of family life in that it sits on the coffee table, part of the fabric of the comings and goings; and a proposition: CCTV still images framed and mounted on the wall, where the faded Constable print and the Green Lady should be: the presentation of anonymously inert observational photographs of her house, and her street. These domestic wall spaces traditionally bear images for pleasure, relaxation, tranquility, and gazing at the images of being gazed at engages indignation of the impoliteness, like being caught staring at what we shouldn’t.
A stark view of Keeble’s perspectives. Keeble delivers a short sharp message that seeps through the pores, the realisation of the outrage and cold anger that a depersonalised domestic space brings, and although inhabited with visitors, reflects the levels and layers of intrusion. Showflat brings forward the artist and their response through the implications of showing in their own home. The gallery environment can act as a buffer, a cushion, a conveyor, with it’s inherent positive and negative connotations, and for an artist who is intensely private, to bare all in the first of this series is a brave and stolid stance, and a distinctive voice to be heard.
