The Pit is pleased to announce God’s Eyes, the latest solo exhibition by Keith Boadwee.  The exhibition will run from January 12 to February 22, 2020 with a public reception on Sunday January 12 from 4-7pm.  The exhibition will consist of a new series of abstract paintings installed in the Pit’s newly renovated gallery space.  

For his second solo exhibition at The Pit, Boadwee has created a new series of paintings reminiscent in aesthetic to older bodies of works that the artist is known for, mainly those made from performative gestures in which the artist uses paint enemas as a mode for mark-making on canvas.  For this exhibition, the method of production is intentionally left ambiguous. These works are a nod to the artist’s history, but perhaps not a direct continuation of those performances. Did he or didn’t he? Boadwee proposes that process is secondary to the larger overarching relationship to the modes in which paintings operate (color, gesture, form, line, etc.) as well as a conversation with the canonical history of painting; specifically what delegates one work to be defined as craft and others as fine art.  The paintings in this body of work all have a similar composition based on a method used in craft traditions called the God’s Eye, in which several different colors of yarn are woven upon a wooden cross.  In Boadwee’s paintings alternating bands of color run across the canvases creating a similar composition. On the one hand the works are a nod and investigation of the history of the God’s Eye, which is a craft tradition, on the other hand, aesthetically the works bear a stronger relationship to the dripping canvases of the Ab Ex painters. 

Boadwee’s thirty-year career has focused on creating works in pursuit of the “pure joy of uninhibited expressive creativity coming from the place of radical queerness and sexual liberty”.  In God’s Eye it is difficult to view these works without considering the roles of sexuality and gender which in the past were attributed to craft work, specifically weaving as “women’s work”, in contrast to that of the Ab Ex movement which was, until recently, historicized primarily as a group of male, heterosexual painters. In God’s Eye, as Boadwee has continually done throughout his career, he has used the history of painting as fertile ground for creating his own works and establishing his own voice while simultaneously celebrating, critiquing, analyzing, and poking fun at art history.