Third Streaming is pleased to announce an exhibition by Jayson Keeling. See Jungle! See Jungle! Go Join Your Gang, Yeah. City All Over! Go Ape Crazy., marks Keeling’s first one-person show at the gallery. The exhibition features a selection of rarely seen photographs shown alongside a new series of paintings and videos.

Taking its cue from a 1981 Bow Wow Wow album, See Jungle! highlights the strong influence of music on the artist’s practice and his fascination with popular and street culture. Drawing from hip-hop, punk, jazz, the 1980‘s New Wave movement as well as from film, and modern and pop art, the work blends visual imagery and text – often appropriated from music lyrics and film narratives – into unexpected outcomes. In addition, Keeling’s bi-cultural upbringing between Jamaica and the Bronx, New York comes into play in subtle ways.

The exhibition title provides a direct example of the cultural-recycling that saturates Keeling’s work. The Bow Wow Wow album cover features a photograph of the band posed as a tableau vivant of Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass, making Keeling’s appropriation of the title a playful commentary on cultural fluidity, the urban jungle, and the power of reinterpretation.

Several of the works on display straddle the gritty physicality of punk and hip-hop and the high-gloss aesthetic of fashion photography. The dialogue between these seemingly disparate outlooks creates a raw energy that Keeling takes advantage of to highlight themes of gender, race and sexuality as well as to provide a critique on commercialism and socio-political issues. In Vampire, 2004/printed 2011 and Mathias, 2002/printed 2011, the careful composition mixes with the interplay of textures to emphasize the strength and sensuality of the human body, as well as, provides a commentary on the dominance of advertising and branding in contemporary culture.

Jayson Keeling was born in New York and raised between Jamaica and the Bronx. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn. His work has been included in exhibitions at El Museo del Barrio (New York), The Andy Warhol Museum (Pittsburgh, PA), Queens Museum of Art, The Bronx Museum, and The Studio Museum in Harlem, among others. Keeling has been awarded residencies from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council as well as the Apex Outbound Residency in Ethiopia.