A Moment with Keelin Montzingo
When did you start working full time as an artist? What was the turning point from your major in communications to you making the switch into the art world?
Majoring in communications was a way of understanding an aspect of the world which fascinated me but this education was just an element of the research that over time I have undertaken as an artist. I don’t see a transition or turning point, my work is outward looking and references trends in communication and media. As an artist there are periods of research and periods of production and I see myself now focusing on producing and studio time, working through the ideas I’ve been developing over the past years.
What is your favorite part of the process?
At the moment I am really enjoying being focused in the studio directing my attention into the physical practice of painting, experimenting with media, process and composition and realizing large scale works which have been in the planning for a while. Scaling up from studies is very exciting, discovering how a cohesive image can develop into abstraction at scale or how a color can contain so many textures and variations. The process of painting reveals a language of its own in the making.
What was the pivoting moment that made you both recognize and re-create your style in the way you have?
Though my current body of works may have a distinctive style, I do not want to be bound by ‘style’ as the idea of this feels restrictive. My work is conceptually led and my current compositions and aesthetic have developed in tangent with me studying the contemporary gaze through instagram and other social media platforms. My current color palette plays with a certain nostalgic language referencing imagery from the 1960s & 70s thinking about the way in which certain eras have been painted with romanticism, ideas of freedom and progressiveness - there is a commentary on nostalgia and the power and danger of it in my work. At the same time there is an earnest celebration of the ideas of freedom, self-expression and hope which have emerged at certain times where a search for self-expression and political polarity co-existed as it does contemporarily.
What is the most important message you hope to convey to those who first look at your work?
I don’t wish for my work to be didactic. Though I have taken a specific route to creating these paintings they remain open and comfortable to be projected on with the viewers interpretation. There is no judgement of my subject matter, I am neither justifying nor criticizing the world I am referencing but rather showing patterns and visual algorithms, presenting an equation which has no definitive resolution. If someone can look at my work and connect dots I may be subconsciously processing but have not yet considered, that's really exciting for me. In a way my paintings are like mirrors waiting for people to tell me what they reflect in them.
What defines artistic success for you?
Personally artistic success is being able to produce work which has integrity and affords an artist autonomy. My idea of success is being able to dedicate my entire time to practice and to have the space and clarity to co-exist with my work.
Where do you see yourself within the next 5 years?
I am beginning to work with curators in London and I’m excited by developing projects in different cities understanding how international or localized my language may be, showing beside other artists who are asking similar questions but addressing them with a completely different visual language. In the next 5 years I would like to see my work develop beyond my own expectations so it’s hard to say from this point what that may look like or how it may manifest.
