serial consign

[josh keyes / interlock #1 / 2007]

Have I mentioned how much I love my ffffound! account lately? The community of image-hunters using the bookmarking site continue to serve up tasty new leads to all manner of fantastic art and design. Yesterday, while perusing the ffffound! image stream I stumbled across the work of Josh Keyes and have subsequently been enthralled by his work.

[josh keyes / weight / 2006]

Keyes' drawings and paintings are a fantastic blend of surreal naturalism that explore hypothetical collisions of wildlife and urban scenes in impossible, combinatory space. This work references a wide range of precedents including architectural representation and visual encyclopedias accented with a dash of semiology. Keyes describes the goal of his creative practice as to:

...create work that asks questions about the implications of urban sprawl and its impact on the environment. I am interested in creating psychological narratives set in closed systems that express the behavior of and the interaction between humans and animals. The dystopian model creates a dynamic playing field where I can experiment with these ideas and forms.

I can't help but fixate on his description of the settings of his work as playing fields. The very first thing I thought of when I saw the above image was Katamari Damacy and the axonometric terrain of Interlock 1 evokes my memories of the interface and geography of Populous. Beyond discussions of rendering style, Keyes constantly clips and cuts his landscapes, flora and fauna to develop the most unlikely views. Keyes' fixation on rectilinear volumes of water (a frequent motif in his work) reminds me of what Canadian theorist and curator Michael Prokopow has called the "shark realities" of Damien Hirst.

I'm really interested in how Keyes deconstructs space and look forward to studying his body of work further in the coming weeks. If you are curious to learn more about his process, check out this interview from this past September.

Thanks to Ryuta Modeki for bookmarking Keyes' work on ffffound!