Iconoclast: Rose Keeffe

Noun | icon· o· clast | \ ī-ˈkä-nə-ˌklast \

1: a person who attacks settled beliefs or institutions

2: a breaker or destroyer of images, especially those set up for veneration.

In this collection of works, Rose Keeffe appropriates classical imagery, convention and narratives with the objective of using the canon of art history to both criticize it, and use it to express her own personal narratives. She rips icons from American pop culture, plays into motifs from art history, and mashes genre to claim them as her own and create her new, unorthodox images.

Keeffe is critical of the history and culture that has been presented to her. As a young woman and a lesbian, she finds that the current canon recorded and venerated by society to be heteronormative and patriarchal. These works are meant to enter a dialogue with an existing classical, historic or social narrative and hijack them to speak more towards her own perceptions and experiences.

With these works, Keeffe hopes to share her perspective on subjects where she herself has previously felt unrepresented. She hopes to deconstruct and reinterpret stories, tropes and mythologies to express her own experiences.

A number of the works featured in this exhibition were created during the ongoing pandemic. These works in particular are meant to document an exasperated frustration with the infrastructure of her own society. The tense and dissonant state of current affairs has driven her works to take a more confrontational and specific edge.

Through her criticism and often blasphemic approach to referencing established imagery, Keeffe takes on the initial role of the iconoclast. She takes icons, be they from mythology, history or culture, and breaks them away from their tired and time-honored contexts. She then hopes to take one more step past iconoclasm and use these usurped icons to make something new and divergent.