Published: May 14th, 2008 - scene magazine
The Future of Heads — What to expect from a show with a title that conjures such bizarre and disparate associations? Haircutting? Lettuce? David Byrne? No — what local artist Mark Keffer displays here is a series of futuristic landscapes, painted on panel and populated with oblong shapes resembling heads, brains, and spinal cords. Take away the head references in the works' titles, however, and viewers will see nothing more than ovoid shapes against richly textured fields of color — hard-edged, graphic stripes and concentric circles, against glowing, drybrushed backgrounds, so intricate that they resemble woodcut prints. His palette (heavy with greens, blues, and pinks) and delicately roughed-up textures suggest the faded indigo of worn blue jeans or the hazy tonal ranges captured by a thermal camera. And the inspiration seems to come from the notion that reality occurs inside our own minds. The show took a lot out of Keffer — a lot of blood, that is. For "Present-day Head (Stars and Stripes)," he covers the paper with Venetian-blind-like stripes of rusty-red congealed blood, and he paints another of his characteristic head shapes in acrylic on top of a hemoglobin-enhanced background. These bloody works are marked "present-day" — as opposed to the "future" of the exhibition's name — and suggest that Keffer means to link the shock and disgust associated with his choice of medium to events of the day. Through June 21 at Exit, 2688 W. 14th St., Cleveland, 330-321-8161. — Bembnister