Rosy Keyser's sculptures are genuine!

The 39-year-old artist is a native American, born and educated in rural Maryland, very used with landscape, which made her sense of history become sharp. She grew up near the Pennsylvania border and went to school in Baltimore. During childhood, Keyser and her siblings would rise early to do chores, “walking with a flashlight braced under my chin, carrying buckets up the hill to the barn before daylight”. After that, the family used to drive them to school through burned-out parts of Baltimore, and then head “back to the country and to copperheads and dirt”.

The artist creates mystery narratives out of wood, found objects, wire, ropes, and many more!

Rosy Keyser arrived for an opening of a group show at Halsey McKay Gallery in East Hampton, New York.

She made a mystery narrative treasure hunt, leaving clues embodied in her paintings. Call it raw realism, or real pieces of nature, of the past, and of the imagination.

For some recent pieces, “I scavenged for corrugated steel in Upstate New York, where the steel had been left for decades in tangled piles to decay. I borrowed it to resuscitate it”, the artist says. “Part of the thrill was trying not to get caught throwing it into the truck.” Her attraction to the corrugated material, she says, was based on what she saw as its “built-in analog quality”. It calls to mind a rib cage and a pulse. “If you add a flat plane behind the material,” she says, “there’s room in the spaces in between allowing it to expose a transitional moment. And, if you tilt it, it has a rogue, unpredictable happening”.

The show included 15 artists dealing with varieties of abstraction and the ways in which painting has been reaching beyond the canvas. Crosby points out how Keyser “is using large stretchers that operate as a kind of grid that she operates with and against. It comes from a formal consideration—a focused, formal sense”.