AWOL Collection
Keith Walsh
Artist Statement
My artwork is research-based, mapping political perspectives and relationships that have evolved within the intertwined histories of socialist and liberation activism in the U. S. and Los Angeles. These radical traditions recognize their common enemies through multi-racial and multi-cultural organization, coalitions, grass roots efforts, and cultural production.
My visual art recovers and presents these suppressed and wildly dispersed social histories, propelling them into the present context. Their meanings are determined partially by systemic social and economic struggles that are further exasperated by recent reactionary U.S. legislation, Supreme Court rulings, sectarian dark money in politics, book bans, and so forth. My artwork engages the unique potential of art as an independent agent for progressive purposes, in opposition to capitalist art, mainstream mediated political history, and the data set limitations of AI.
I move between producing diagrams of these histories, drawings that interpolate my engagement with historical information and ephemera, systemic color field maps, activist portraiture, flyers, rhetorical analyses, future-oriented pieces, and environmental agitation.
My formal approaches are influenced by various 20th century modern art movements that were closely associated with revolutionary political practices, conceptual art, OP art, and many types of political literature and ephemera.
My artwork is research-based, mapping political perspectives and relationships that have evolved within the intertwined histories of socialist and liberation activism in the U. S. and Los Angeles. These radical traditions recognize their common enemies through multi-racial and multi-cultural organization, coalitions, grass roots efforts, and cultural production.
My visual art recovers and presents these suppressed and wildly dispersed social histories, propelling them into the present context. Their meanings are determined partially by systemic social and economic struggles that are further exasperated by recent reactionary U.S. legislation, Supreme Court rulings, sectarian dark money in politics, book bans, and so forth. My artwork engages the unique potential of art as an independent agent for progressive purposes, in opposition to capitalist art, mainstream mediated political history, and the data set limitations of AI.
I move between producing diagrams of these histories, drawings that interpolate my engagement with historical information and ephemera, systemic color field maps, activist portraiture, flyers, rhetorical analyses, future-oriented pieces, and environmental agitation.
My formal approaches are influenced by various 20th century modern art movements that were closely associated with revolutionary political practices, conceptual art, OP art, and many types of political literature and ephemera.
