Keith Mayerson: Souvenirs bakery, 18 April - 15 August 2009

Keith Mayerson (1966, Cincinnati Ohio) is a New York-based artist who has been exhibiting his paintings and drawings for over 16 years. He draws from popular culture for his personal cosmologies, consciously and subconsciously adding warmth, transmutation and ethereality to his subject matter. The drawings serve as a window into an unconscious world mapped onto the image by the artist, using the subject matter as a talisman to relatable content, memory, or synesthetic perception to provoke the same in the viewer.

For Souvenirs, Mayerson was inspired by his recent trips to Amsterdam. These visits were pilgrimages to see many of the works of his heroes, and the city that they and their art found home. Mayerson took photographs with the intention of making drawings and paintings that culled from the fond memories of his visits. Much like Anne Frank's bedroom walls, where she pasted images of icons, art historical imagery, and scenes to give her and her family hope, Mayerson has constructed a salon-style exhibition of drawings and artists and their work, and places from around the city that he found moving and meaningful, and scenes and people who had made a profound impact on him. By doing so, Mayerson constructs a personal vocabulary of semiotic exploration of meaning and interpretation.