Menace and beauty, vigilance and innocence, tenderness and terror—Clayton Keyes hit all of these emotional registers in Subterfuge, his recent solo show at 108|Contemporary. Walking through the exhibit, I experienced the same humbling, disarming range of feelings that often hits me when sitting in, say, an Advent service, where hope and joy intermingle with other presences in the room: fear, longing, the specter of death.
With more than a dozen ceramic sculptures that were technically extraordinary and conceptually resonant, Subterfuge considered the ways that religious, political, and corporate powers both manipulate and degrade life on earth—and performed a subtle subterfuge of its own. Spatially arranged so that the gallery’s vast white space became a sort of cathedral, the work never named its villains outright; instead, it explored their methods and mores, while insisting on the dignity of the beings damaged in their wake.