Keelan McMorrow is a self-taught visual artist living and working in Chicago, Illinois. He employs traditional materials but through unconventional process; entrenched as a teenager in the punk rock of 1990’s middle America, Keelan was shaped by the strident, “anything-goes” attitude and die-hard work ethic of DIY subculture. Those experiences and that mindset spill out from the hidden cracks of his paintings today.
“The current focus of my work is on flesh as a sort of symbolism, the tearing apart of bodies and limbs as conventional figurative motifs and arriving at something more elemental. I’ve been juxtaposing these pieces with old tools, implements, animals – anything true that connects deeper aspects of the human condition to its latent chaos, our inherent fears and mortality. In 2016 I lost my brother to a congenital heart defect; all of my work has been sifted through the funnel of that horror since then.”
