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.
The deliciously unsettling power of Keyes’ work comes in its exposure of the ways in which polarities—good and evil, preservation and decay, the sinister and the precious—often dwell together. Two icons flanked the entrance to the show, setting a gentle yet ominous tone: an infant and a baby deer resting together (“Do Unto Others”), and a young man holding open a gash in his side from which oak leaves and acorns emerged (“Walk Lightly”). Along one wall, a series of panels (“Casual-ties”) hovered over candles like Stations of the Cross—a dead mouse with one paw extending from the panel’s surface, haloed with a whorled roundel; an eagle grasping a snake in its talons; an exquisitely detailed pelican—each punctuated with dowels or jointures whose wood grain made a beautiful counterpoint to the rough clay surfaces. These entrance panels and stations, like the ones in a Catholic church, served as focal points for meditation, inviting viewers to consider the twinned realities of vitality and violence, softness and savagery.
Larger sculptures positioned throughout the center of the space brought these meditations into full-figured—and profoundly moving—action. Keyes makes clay feel alive and urgent, as if it were on the verge of breaking into speech. I heard the voice of watchful caution in the alert body of an owl, whose feathers blended in with the lichen-encrusted textures of the oak branches arranged behind it. I felt the interest and then the panic of a fish and a frog being lured irrevocably toward the prehistoric jaws of a snapping turtle. With one hand shielding his eyes from the sun and the other pointed down towards the earth—a bi-directional gesture that guided the viewer to prepare to consider more than one thing at once—a boy stood like a young prophet in a pool of light, his pajama pants softly wrinkling around his knees, his eyes full of something between dread and trust.