Additional commentary
“In this great assortment of images and materials, the work of Albuquerque artist David Keating represents the conceptual linchpin. His complex yet understated work is about sentiment and nostalgia, memory, loss and change… it’s concerned not only with the inevitability of loss, but the monuments we use to recall that loss. For Keating the photograph has the potential to make a unique linkage through time and space, the ability to make profound observations about truth, memory and mortality.”
— Kay Whitney, The Weekly Alibi
“Keating’s vision is both deeply personal and coldly objective… In Keating’s work, double entendres, sarcasm, surprise endings, and twists in the text force the viewer to read between the lines and function as a complement to the photograph. Emotion is embedded in sentences without being directly stated… He is neither simply photographer nor poet—he is an artist, and the combination of text and image produces a piece whose complexity cannot be elucidated by one medium alone. ”
— Wendy Arbeit, “Public Perceptions and Private Realities: The Examination of David Keating’s Sculptures from a Queer Theory Perspective,” A Thesis for the Degree of Master of Liberal Arts, Harvard University
“Equally successful are David Keating’s text pieces… [These] are among the most disturbing works on view, but are also the coolest, making their statements in the seemingly disengaged language of advertising and illustration.”
— Alan Artner, Chicago Tribune
“In this work, Keating… has taken a grief stricken experience and made it into something of great beauty.”
— Simone Ellis, Santa Fe Reporter