Artist Talk: Keeley Haftner “Artist-as-Curator”
Gordon Snelgrove Gallery
January 14, 2015 at 12pm
Keeley Haftner is a Chicago-based Canadian artist whose works result from investigating value-driven material hierarchies. Through processes ranging from 3D printing waste to tumbling broken ceramics, Haftner seeks to invoke a complicated object-lust in the viewer by way of the
loaded symbolic object. Haftner obtained her BFA in 2011 from Mount Allison University. Though an emerging artist, she has obtained an expansive list of grants, awards, professional and exhibition experience. Haftner is the New Brunswick winner of the 2011 BMO Financial Group’s 1st Art! Art Competition. She participated in Toronto’s 2012 Nuit Blanche and has participated in residencies within Canada, the U.S, and Iceland. Haftner is the founder and previous director of Street Meet Festival. She has exhibited work nationally and internationally, and received national attention for her 2013 public commission by Saskatoon’s Placemaker Program. Haftner and a collaborating scientist from the University of Chicago are recipients of the 2015-16 Arts, Science & Culture Initiative Collaboration Grant and she is soon to be published in the upcoming 3D Additivist Cookbook. Haftner is currently pursuing her MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Haftner curated “A specific amalgam of spirit and dirt” (AKA artist-run, Jan. 15 – February 27, 2016) in collaboration with three Canadian painters whose practices are emerging or have emerged through the re-examination of contemporary painting: Ben Reeves, Ambera Wellmann and Sean Weisgerber. Her talk will address how these diverse practices came together and evolved into a collective exploration of complex sincerity and dark comedy through a medium that Chris Down refers to as an “uneasy alloy” of the sensual and rational.
