Footnotes

PROVENANCE
Niagara Galleries, Melbourne (label attached verso)
Private collection, Melbourne

EXHIBITED
David Keeling: Second Love Song, Niagara Galleries, Melbourne 28 October - 22 November 2003 (illus.)
The Fleurieu Biennale Art Prize, McLaren Vale, South Australia, 1 - 24 November 2002

LITERATURE
David Hansen, David Keeling, Quintus Publishing, Hobart, 2007, p. 34-35 (illus.)


'In our culture of visual overload, info stress and superb photographs of wilderness, how does a landscape artist persuade people to stop, pay attention and think about a painting?

David Keeling's solutions to this contemporary problem are varied, complex and intriguing. The one we notice immediately is his use of provocative, mind teasing images that hint at a personal narrative. Into the deceptively three-dimensional landscape intrudes a fourth dimension of time, for these implied stories elicit questions: what happened before this frame? What will happen after?

These narratives are not arbitrary or innocent. Keeling has very definite messages about the places he paints. His landscape is not picturesque, sublime or even benign; it is critical, contested space that raises intense and emotionally loaded questions about environmental politics and the positioning of landscape in contemporary cultural debate.

Take the road. We have been schooled by the picturesque tradition to expect a road drawings us into a picture, as in End of the Road, where the sandy track leads through an arch of trees to the distant water; but more often Keeling's roads have political mileage. They remind us that, as voluntary prisoners within our cars, we are programmed to travel through the landscape by pre-assigned routes. We are fringe-travellers, manipulated by those who have a vested interest in screening out the devastation left in the wake of industries, and in deflecting our attention to other vistas that are skilfully displayed and framed up for us as though in an eighteenth century Claude glass'.1

1. Rosslyn Haynes, David Keeling, exh. cat., Niagara Galleries, Melbourne, 2002, n.p.