Kennedy O’Keefe paints, draws, and photographs things that might make you feel strange. 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.
Her artwork is true to how she sees the world, bleak and unsettling, but also full of warm light, 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 immediately started crawling on it, and flies eating its eyes. The next day I fell asleep in a cemetery! I lay there under 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 dreamt of white doorways and a limestone angel, kneeling and praying I think, with its eyes closed---Oh wait. No, they're open. Just looking down. Sorry."
xoxox
Kennedy