Keith Maddy is a Boston based artist working out of Vernon Street Studios, Somerville. Keith holds a BFA w/distinction from Massachusetts College of Art and is the recipient of several Massachusetts LLC Visual Arts grants. He won 2nd Place Best Show in an alternative Boston Gallery for Surrounded, 2003 at Brickbottom Gallery, Somerville by the AICA. He has exhibited throughout New England and extensively in the greater Boston area including the Boston Center for the Arts, City Hall, Logan International Airport, Mills Gallery, The Distillery, Somerville Museum, Harvard Univ., Attleboro Museum, Schoolhouse Gallery Provincetown, Nahcotta in Portsmouth NH, Vermont College, and Kentler Drawing Space Brooklyn. Keith’s work can be found on a line of candles by Aunt Sadie’s and featured in a new book, Mixed Media Collage, Quarry Books 2007. He is represented in the Boston Drawing Project at the Bernard Toale Gallery, 38 Cameron in Cambridge and at the William Scott Gallery in Provincetown where new work will be on exhibit May–October 2008.
Keith’s imagery begins with familiar vintage materials, such as reproductions of oil paintings, patterned cloth and ephemera. Responding to the material’s lines, forms, color and texture, he sands down surfaces and builds up layers with collage, drawing on top of them with graphite, gesso, a wood burning tool and in some cases, a blow torch. He edits out what he does not want from the original source material and incorporates other elements into a new playful abstract work where subtle layers overlap each other and organic shapes flourish and interact. Keith effectively reinvents his materials and challenges his audience’s power
of perception and recognition.