TheGallery’s 25 Years Exhibition Showcase - Ian McKeever: Against Architecture

Verity Babbs 03/11/2023

To celebrate TheGallery’s 25th anniversary, a reconfiguration of AUB Honorary Fellow Ian McKeever’s 2017 work ‘Against Architecture’ has been installed, on display until January 2024. 

‘Against Architecture’ was a winning choice from TheGallery to mark their quandranscentennial, because despite being a solo show (and a gallery with such a rich list of previous exhibitors could have easily put on a fantastic group show retrospective) this exhibition captures exactly what TheGallery is all about: creating opportunities for audiences to engage with art in a meaningful and novel way.

As soon as we enter the gallery space we are confronted by a jungle of irregular wooden structures, with small-scale works dotted throughout. These pieces, which are places both high and low, demonstrate McKeever’s mastery of texture, colour, and artwork pairing. Viewers squeeze through gaps in the structures, sometimes with their hands out in front of them as if they were in a fairground maze of mirrors. It was striking to see quite how much fun visitors were having moving through the installation, encouraging each other to view works from different angles and guiding one another where to turn. 

The space is so non-uniform that it affects your internal compass, meaning visitors can allow themselves to be guided entirely by instinct. Exhibitions often seem to frame art-viewing as a temporal exercise, not a corporeal one, but ‘Against Architecture’ allows us to give over control to our senses, crane our necks, squat down, and experience the wonderful variety of textures McKeever has placed on display. After dark, the artificial lights of the gallery further complicate the layout, casting new areas into shadow and adding to the sense that this installation is a unique visual microcosm.

The installation, made from offcuts of old works of McKeever’s and run-of-the-mill building supplies, begs the question - what does it mean for something to be “finished”? The wooden boards used in the structure still have original manufacturing text on them, the wood is untreated, and these materials wouldn’t be out of place on a building site. The professional ambiguity of the space TheGallery and McKeever have created is exciting - we rarely see these materials in a fine art space, and yet truly beautiful and intricate works are hung on their raw surfaces. 

In a second room, other works by McKeever including larger-scale paintings are hung more traditionally, which acts a nice counterpart to the labyrinthine installation. These works demonstrate the same skills of building up dynamic textures and creating dualities within a composition. Many of the works include a Barnett Newman-esque divide off-centre, or are presented as two separate but corresponding halves. It was a pleasure to experience a selection of McKeever’s works with more physical space around them, giving us more mental room to fully consider them.

Curated by Violet M McClean, ‘Ian McKeever: Against Architecture’ is a wonderful use of TheGallery space, which will hopefully continue to execute engaging and boundary-pushing exhibitions for another 25 years to come.