The show Braided Bread is a site-specific installation created by Chicago artists Scott Cowan and Katy Keefe. For this exhibition, Cowan and Keefe focus their energy towards the formation, reproduction, and experimentation with what they like to call “secondary objects.” Cowan and Keefe’s work, with its particular brand of humor, enjoys offsetting the viewer into a thinkspace that questions the traditional gallery experience. This displacement occurs as the artists change the physical paths of observation, question the stability of the materials used, and strive jokingly to reproduce their subject matter. While the main space of the gallery is occupied with mutely-colored artworks, the two unreachable pieces boast the brightest colors, and thus attract the most attention; a multi-colored inaccessible loft is painted with the artists’ butts and an over-sized still-life situated in a closed off room, can only be seen by the glimpse of a mirror. One painting exhibits playful renderings of a subject matter and the other artist then duplicates the painting. Paper is drenched in heavy plaster that rips at the seams of the hardware struggling to hold it on the wall. This seemingly stable installation challenges preconceived notions of the art experience and what it pretends to be.
For this exhibition, Scott Cowan and Katy Keefe’s compatibility is on display. The show, made up of paintings, photographs, drawings, sculptures and wall-installations, was created as a team. The importance of this work ethic beholds the conclusion that because of this closeness, the artists were able to create the work in a collaborative fashion that taught and guided their artistic process.