Drew Keefer

Artist Statement

I really wanted to go fight in Rojava and help build the new world but I'm land locked by health issues and about to age out. Anyways I don't care how low the quality of political discourse in this country sinks or how much our domestic reality insists on resembling bad television. I look to Africa, I look to Asia, to northern Syria and Central Europe and Brazil, and I know the world is changing and it's not going to stop. So I can sit atop this fossil rapidly sinking between the Atlantic and the Pacific and just go on being human and spitting in the face of certain annihilation, And it can be beautiful! And it can matter. There can be Joy in living and Joy in failure and Joy in trying again. So, charcoal is my main medium, my default as far as a tool for rendering human beings goes. I have great respect for mass of photographs in existence chronicalling the ongoing struggle for liberation, I think the camera has done its job and I don't need to anything, so for figurative elements I stick with charcoal, which brings both a thematic and stylistic unity to my work. I add color because, well, at this time the temptation is to regard these photos as reflecting a legacy of total failure.Color is the effort to contextualize these images in a new space, one that's exciting, unpredictable, a space where anything is possible. A space where the future is unwritten, and a space where I and other people can live beautifully, no matter how bad things get.