Press Release: Almost Exactly

Cassandra C. Jones • Richard Keen • Daisy St. Sauveur
May 3 – June 16, 2019

Abigail Ogilvy Gallery is proud to present Almost Exactly, an exhibition featuring new artwork by Cassandra C. Jones, Richard Keen, and Daisy St. Sauveur. The exhibition requires the viewer to actively engage with the artwork, recognize its subjects and representation, and perceive the contradictions inherent in all three artists’ themes and methods. Cassandra C. Jones is a remix artist who works with prints, digital art, collage, and video to tell contemporary stories, challenging perception and understanding of everyday imagery. In this exhibition, Jones will debut a new series of prints alongside a wallpaper installation. The gallery is pleased to introduce two new artists in this show, Daisy St. Sauveur and Richard Keen. St. Sauveur creates loud and vibrant prints and paintings, breathing life into the outdated media of printmaking that is often overlooked by younger generations. Keen utilizes minimalism and abstraction in his paintings, removing unnecessary details and simplifying the world and his subjects into their most basic forms.

All three artists approach their art using a continuous exploratory path through which they are regularly decontextualizing, deconstructing, and reconstructing. They break down their images either by reducing them to minimalist detail, discarding the image’s previous identity, or stripping them of context altogether – inherently creating a new identity or meaning for the image at hand. The resulting form is created in a way that is specific to each artist’s process and technique.

The included artworks play with the dichotomy between the perceived and the portrayed image. Jones, St. Sauveur, and Keen all use symbols, shapes, and objects that are readily recognizable, but they have depicted and applied them in such a way that requires the viewers to actively assess and study the work. The artists offer an perspective that is ripe for the viewer to analyze based on their own knowledge and experiences.

Cassandra C. Jones remixes photos into a composition completely disparate from their component image, ultimately becoming prismatic reflections of contemporary pop culture. In her new body of work, Forever Temporary, she uses a single image of a beach ball to create a variety of cactus species. In 2017, a massive wildfire swept through the small desert town of Ojai, CA, where Jones’ lives. It consumed over 500 homes on the very first night and raged for over a month. All the modern-day conveniences, and synthetics of our time, turned to acidic embers, bad gases, and nano-plastics. They rose up into the air, into the atmosphere and then they gently floated down, onto our landscape, as the softest and smallest of relics. When the rains finally came so did a super bloom of color; flowers and succulents, cactus and perennials blanket the terrain. Just like the smog that makes the sunsets more beautiful; it is so vibrant yet still spoiled. The beach ball represents the ordinary disposable possessions in our lives. It is pretty, shiny, and fun, much like new technologies, beauty products, food packaging, synthetic clothes; and like all of those things it is short-lived and replaceable. In whatever way our creations of this caliber are disposed of or destroyed, recycled or reused, the human-made ingredients that go into them are becoming part of our natural world, creating shifting waters, altered landscapes, and new gardens that are forever and temporary all at once. 

Daisy St. Sauveur works in screenprint and etching to decontextualize a traditional medium into our technology-based society that is keen on receiving immediate gratification. She utilizes bright colors, abstraction, and recognizable symbols based on American pop culture and the 2000s. As an artist born into the first year of Generation Z, she wants her art to be extreme, intense, and memorable. St. Sauveur’s logo is representative of things that come and go quickly; the “ST” symbol engulfed by the recognizable Beanie Babies™ logo is a reminder of fads that come and go with haste. A collection of hundreds of items, tossed out with the introduction of the next trend in sight. However, the things that define Daisy’s generation—rap music, bright colors, technology, and partying—are, in fact, not fads but instead important concepts that continue to evolve in life today. St. Sauveur’s artwork poses the question: As we near a new decade of the 2020s, how do we continue to intertwine the old with the new?

Richard Keen simplifies the world and his subjects into their most basic forms: line, shape, color, and texture. The primary factor in his art is the merger between abstraction and realism. Keen’s Form Singularity series is rooted in a minimalist, reductive approach to painting. His imagery is ocean-based, with horizons and water, and contain many of the structural elements of boats – a rudder, an oar, the hull of a ship. In choosing his subjects, Keen focuses on both natural and man-made surroundings for inspiration. Rooted in both the past and present, he considers the history of Maine when creating his paintings. While the works are meant to reference objects and scenes, by removing the details almost entirely Keen urges the viewer to step away and then get close in order to understand the work’s meaning.

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Cassandra C. Jones lives and works in Ojai, CA. She is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University with an MFA in Interdisciplinary Fine Arts and received her BFA from California College of Arts with a concentration in Photography/Glass. Jones has been awarded artist residencies in Germany, the Czech Republic, Canada, and across the United States, and her work has been exhibited both throughout the United States and in Europe. Select recent exhibitions include Digital Worlds: New Media from the Museum’s Collection, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Houston, TX (2018), The Awakening, Abigail Ogilvy Gallery, Boston MA (2017), and Ritual and Desire, Wichita Art Museum, Wichita, KS (2017). She has received several awards and residencies, including the Egon Schiele Art Centrum, Drake Hotel Artist Residency, Invitational, Toronto, Canada (2006), and the Vira I. Heinz Endowment awarded by the Virginia Center of Creative Arts (2004).

Richard Keen is a contemporary abstract artist who works in a variety of media, including painting, murals, and sculpture. He has shown in numerous New England solo and group exhibitions at the University of Maine Museum of Art, Abigail Ogilvy Gallery, Elizabeth Moss Gallery, The Painting Center, New York, Gallery 49, Simon Gallery, and Barrett Art Center, among others. Keen has been featured in Art New England, Boston Voyager Magazine, Portland Herald Press, and Maine Home and Design.

Daisy St. Sauveur is a printmaker and painter working in Boston, MA. She graduated from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, MA. From screenprint to etching, St. Sauveur combines different methods of printmaking with drawing and painting to work in a way that is layered, colorful, and collage-like. Her work has been featured locally at the Piano Craft Gallery, the South Shore Art Center, and most recently at the MassArt Annual Auction.