Erin O'Keefe

Erin O’Keefe’s oblique geometric photographs are staged to look like abstract paintings. O’Keefe received her BFA from Cornell University and earned a master’s degree in architecture from Columbia. Over two decades as an architecture professor, she used the visual experiments of color theorist Josef Albers as a case study to understand how color shapes our perception of space, a preoccupation that served as a springboard for her own work. Combining elements of photography, painting, and sculpture, O’Keefe constructs formal still life arrangements using hand-painted cardboard, plexiglass, and wood blocks and photographs them under precise lighting conditions, seemingly flattening three-dimensional objects to appear as if they exist on a single plane. Her illusory photographs emphasize the ambiguity of spatial relationships and simultaneously recall the perspectival illusions of M.C. Escher, the planar forms of Le Corbusier’s architecture, and even Giotto’s flattened rendering of figures and architectural space.