Kennedy O’Keefe paints, draws, and photographs things that might make you feel strange and unsettled. Her work is an exploration of dreamery, modern biblical, and medieval subject matter. She is continuously exploring what it means to be alive and thinking, and how she would like her visual art to reflect that.
Her artwork is true to how she sees the world, bleak and full of unsettling feelings, but also warm light, the feeling of listening to sweet jazz music, and memories from her dreams. She is inspired by Catholic art from the European Renaissance because it is a display of patience and intense belief. She is also influenced by the morbidity of natural selection. Each of her pieces is tied together by an interest in the macabre and the liminal, and she enjoys exploring how religion and death are undoubtedly intertwined among these themes.
" I put a dead bird into a nest I made and bugs crawled on it and flies ate its eyes. The next day I fell asleep in a cemetery! I was lying there looking at the graves with my ear to the ground when bugs started crawling on me and I imagined I was the bird from yesterday. I waited for flies to eat my eyes and then I fell asleep. I dreamed about white doorways and a limestone angel, kneeling and praying I think, with its eyes closed---Oh wait. No, sorry they're open. Just looking down."
xoxox
Kennedy