Artist Blog

Every week an artist whose single image was published by Der Greif is given a platform in which to blog about contemporary photography.

Greetings! I'm happy to be taking part in this endeavor as guest contributor for Der Greif. I am going to share with you some artists who inspire me and whose work I feel a kinship with. Erin O'Keefe is someone whose work I had long experienced online and upon moving to New York this past summer got to see in person at Denny Gallery as part of the group show Frameshift. How she uses photography to depict constructed space and how reality collapses into mark making in her work is of principal interest to me. In her own words, Erin O'Keefe is a visual artist and architect based in New York City and New Brunswick, Canada. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Cornell University and a Master of Architecture from Columbia University. »I am a visual artist and an architect, and my work is informed by both of these disciplines. My background in architecture is the underpinning for my art practice, providing my first sustained exposure to the issues and questions that I currently contend with in my photographs. The questions that I ask through my work are about the nature of spatial perception, and the tools that I use are rooted in the abstract, formal language of making that I developed as an architect. As a photographer, I am interested in the layer of distortion and misapprehension introduced by the camera as it translates three dimensional form and space into two dimensional image. This inevitable and often fruitful misalignment is the central issue in my practice.«