Jayson Keeling


Jayson Keeling is an artist working in photography, video, sculpture, and installation. Keeling's work challenges conventional norms surrounding sex, gender, race, and religion. Keeling often reconfigures popular iconography, to explore notions of masculinity, and cultural ritual.

Early life and education

Jayson Keeling was born in 1966 in Brooklyn, NY to Jamaican parents. Keeling's grew up between Jamaica and the Bronx, New York. His bi-cultural upbringing would later influence his work. Keeling graduated from the Fashion Institute of Technology in 1986 with an AA in Fashion Illustration and Art History. Keeling started off by working as a photographer and film director in fashion, music, film, and the pornography industry.

Art

Jayson Keeling mines popular culture, and mythology to create artworks that question and deconstruct accepted politics of sex, gender, race, and religion. Keeling works in photography, video, sculpture, and installation.
His work often pulls from different visual cultures and then "jams them all into the same frame." Keeling often works in the realms in-between cultures, creating work that is "neither here nor there." He often uses performative gestures to explore ritual and masculinity.
Jayson Keeling's photographs have been described as violent, sexy, glam and grotesque.
A work by Keeling, a diptych of photographs of legendary dancer and choreographer, Willi Ninja, exhibited at the 2008 "The B Sides" show at Aljira, a Center for Contemporary Art was described by art critic Benjamin Genocchio as "one of the show's most arresting exhibits" in The New York Times.

Selected exhibitions

2014
2013
2012
2011
2010
2009
2008
2007