Erin O’Keefe | I saw the man with a telescope.

October 25 – December 21, 2024

Sargent’s Daughters is pleased to present “I saw the man with a telescope.”, a solo exhibition of new works by New York-based photographer Erin O’Keefe. O’Keefe uses photography as a tool to create images that highlight the unreliability of meaning and the dynamic nature of visual interpretation.

O’Keefe cuts and paints blocks of wood, arranges them in front of colored backdrops, and then photographs the composition. Though the resulting images have the hard-edge gloss of abstract paintings, closer inspection reveals the overlaps and shadows between objects, as well as the rich texture of the roughly painted surfaces. For O’Keefe, the directness of this process and the limited set of elements provide constraints and opportunities that shape the final form of the work. The specific material characteristics of these things – their weight, gravity, opacity, color – present a familiar, tactile aspect of the work that pushes against the enigmatic nature of the compositions.

The title of the exhibition, “I saw the man with a telescope.” alludes to the ambiguity of the images and the impossibility of a single interpretation. The plane of the camera lens flattens and distorts the three dimensional scene it captures, and the viewer is left with confounding images that withhold any certainty, existing in a space of possibility and speculation.

Erin O’Keefe is a photographer and architect based in New York City. Recent group exhibitions include AND/ALSO: Photography (Mis)represented at Kasmin Gallery, New York in 2020, Evening of the Day at Galerie Julien Cadet, Paris in 2023. Solo exhibitions include Certain Things at Seventeen Gallery, London in 2020, a solo presentation commissioned by Deutsche Bank at Frieze NY in 2022, A solo presentation at The Pitzhanger Manor and Gallery, London in 2023, and Nonfiction at Seventeen Gallery, London in 2023. O’Keefe’s work has been reviewed or featured in Artforum, Frieze, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The Village Voice, VICE Magazine, and Paper Journal. O’Keefe’s work is in museum collections including the Mead Art Museum, Museum Voorlinden, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

O’Keefe received her BFA from Cornell University in Ithaca, NY and her Master of Architecture from Columbia University in New York, NY. She was a recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in photography in 2019.