Klompching Gallery is delighted to announce the solo exhibition of artworks by the US photographer, Doug Keyes—showcasing photographs from his Collective Memory and Becoming Language series.

Collective Memory is a provocative series of photographs, in which Keyes condenses the content of an entire book into one photograph, through the multiple exposure of the book’s pages onto a single sheet of film. The resulting layered image, re-presented at the same size as the original book, provides a wonderful symphony of color and texture, of opaque pages rendered transparent and which conceal as much as they reveal. Iconic, and sometimes obscure, Keyes’ subjects range from Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat Comes Back to The Holy Bible to Damien Hirst’s I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life. These luminous photographs suggest a visualization of knowledge stacking up over time, as well as evoking the experience of engaging with the book itself.

The Becoming Language series, too, elicit photography’s relationship with time, memory and knowledge. In this series, multiple exposures of ubiquitous urban landscapes incorporate subliminal markers of public information. Keyes calls into question the building blocks of our knowledge of these spaces—whether it is developed through direct experience or whether it is a phenomena resulting from experience altered by the unconscious data collected from elsewhere.

Keyes successfully links the images in both series to memory and knowledge of places and objects—it is stacked, blurred and softened. Information illuminates through the two-dimensional space of his photographs, but there remains an appropriate amount of space for ambiguity and conjecture.

Doug Keyes lives and works in Seattle. Over the course of 20 years, his photographs have been exhibited at numerous venues across Northern America. Keyes is the recipient of a number of awards including the Ned Behnke Artist Fellowship, Behnke Foundation (1999), Review Americas (Photolucida) Photographer of the Year, Photo Americas (2001) and Juror’s Choice Award, Project Competition, CENTER (2007). His photographs can be found in several notable collections including the Akron Art Museum, Berkeley Art Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art amongst others.