The Renaissance magician is relaxed in his certainty that all Earthly objects are filled with sympathies for things in outer space. He is simply a technician who enters into this matrix of influences and tries to canalize the vacuum’s power. It is impossible to now discern high technology from high magic, to not see ‘drawing down’ for what it has always been, but we should remember that the tools of the magician are not and were never discrete. They are talismanic, and what images he etches, there in his laboratory, are as crucial as their time-debt. The magician knows that form is only potential. If the energy poured in twists, the object might reorganize. Like the Catholic sorcery which, as we all know, was first guileless and Egyptian; like the apparatus of death that, at university, was just math. Or as the decan images of Giordano Bruno, a friar incinerated in 1600 by sapients who feared the forms themselves, who suspected (rightly) that these forms might not merely harness the stars but could incubate new space entirely, self-perpetuating space in fact; like a station arrived at already complete and, worse, without any legible application, therefore terrifyingly impervious to either censure or gravity. What makes a magical image? In the studio, Keane says she thinks through the tools. She is known for her sculptures which hang like pendulums and subtract, almost imperially, their own orbits. This is her first show entirely of collage, though that cannot be the correct term. These are ‘sculpted images’, built without a singlemark from a marking implement. All textures are residue from a prayerful duration of cutting, glueing, heating, scoring, pulling, and laminating paper and metalized film. Keane works from both sides of the substrate. The labour is slow. She says, about making work that is flat, that she was trying to get away from the axial, though I think the spines in her sculptures may have just touched ends and shown up again as reticles. The resulting perspective is fragile, even a bit dangerous. You are required to move close to achieve it and when you do, your own head enters the crosshairs. Here the tendency to degrade mathematical beauty with its own criminalcitations should be resisted. The station remains unassigned. One cannot look at a circle, of course, without receiving sun target eye, or a line without tree ladder edifice. Small works echo a masterwork. Not a person or cosmology and also not some replacement for those. What is drawn down is better understood inside Keane’s time-debt. She remarks, in her studio, that most of what she does in there is look and things that are looked at change. One will recall this mystery from quantum physics. How an object’s behaviour may be affected by what it has experienced in its lifetime, a correlation the medieval quant would think obvious. Likewise, these images contain sympathies for an interior that, for your purposes, isuseless. Words by Allison Bulger
