I Pannrummet visar vi utställningen Wet-on-wet av Kristen Keegan (Norge/Kanada). Wet-on-wet är resultatet av den självpåtagna utmaningen att skapa ett platsspecifikt verk på distans.

Pannrummet’s layered, unstable surfaces provide the framework for Kristen Keegan’s stained colour-abstractions. Allowing the gallery walls to permeate the work through transparency and framing, Wet-on-wet is pursued as an approach rather than a technique– softening the monumental, and considering how space and painting work to form one another.

“Four years ago I wrote: ‘In the hospital, on steroids I have the feeling for perhaps the first time in my life that I can simply ‘be.’ I no longer have to push myself to do anything, to prove anything. I can just sit on the bed and be.”
–Moyra Davey, “The Wet and the Dry”

In the time preparing for this exhibition, in an old epidemic hospital, I reflected on my own brief stays in hospital. The locus of trauma for those events was not the hospital, rather, the hospital was a place to go to be repaired. It still leaves the sticky feeling of being cared for. Having no ambition other than allowing oneself to be. The memory that ‘sticks’ has become the pleasant feeling on waking. Nurses drifting in and out. Sunlight through a window (on drugs, of course). And the conflated memories of pastel-coloured curtains. Now I am thinking of Poul Gernes’ Herlev Hospital rooms. What do the patients who woke to a technicolour dream remember of their stays?

In the exhibition Wet-on-wet, at Pannrummet, Galleri Konstepidemin, Kristen Keegan will present the results of a self-imposed challenge to develop a site-specific work from afar. With only a few photographs of the space to rely on, conjecture and imagination have been major players in her process. Returning to a larger scale and embracing a shorter timeframe for production, these works have taken a more spontaneous turn.

Employing one of her large-scale colour abstractions as a room partition, Keegan takes both functional and decorative textiles as inspiration in her work. Her fields of colour, applied as liquid dye on cloth, have here been treated a second time with an oil-based solution for waterproofing, returning them to their original appearance as ‘wet’.

Pannrummet’s layered, unstable surfaces are framed by Keegan’s work, while transparency in the work transmits the surrounding space. Wet-on-wet is here pursued as an approach rather than a technique– softening the monumental, and considering how space and painting form one another.

Kristen Keegan

(born in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, 1988) is an artist based in Bergen, Norway. She received an MA from the Bergen Art Academy in 2019. Recent solo exhibitions include Field, LNM, Oslo (2021), Soft, Mikey Laundry Art Garden, Bergen (2020), Colour Gap, Studio 17, Stavanger (2019), The urgent, slow gaze, Hordaland Kunstsenter, Bergen (2019), and Slipping Image, c3, Melbourne (2018). Keegan is a current recipient of the Billedkunstnernes Vederlagsfond one-year stipend, and a Canada Council for the Arts grant. Her solo exhibition Wet-on-wet at Galleri Konstepidemin will be her first in Sweden.