NEW YORK— Whipsmart young conceptualist Matt Keegan appears to be exploring a new vein of art making: If the go-go market of the last several years brought us what British critic Ossian Ward dubbed “bling conceptualism” (exhibit A being Terence Koh’s gold-plated turds), Keegan is making what we might call “domestic conceptualism.”  (Put differently, if there can be said to be artists of the sublime — Barnett Newman, et al — Keegan may be our first artist of the subprime.) His current show at D’Amelio Terras in New York, titled "New Windows" and running though April 25, is affectingly zeitgeisty, but it takes some time, some extended looking, and a little puzzling out to fully experience it.

Nearly blocking your passage into the small room that houses his work is a tall slab of drywall on which are carefully incised phrases like “Who are they and when are they coming?” which were garnered from the movie Field of Dreams. Past this slab are six small photocollages that take as their starting point a banal event in Keegan’s old apartment on New York’s Lower East Side. The super had come to fix a window. Keegan photographed him at work several times, and has taken the images apart and rearranged them, such that the super’s tools — hammer, tubs of sheetrock, broom, gloves, sponge, trowel, hose, garbage can, spirit level — are arrayed around the room in strange ways. So is the super himself, who sometimes seems to be working outside the window, beyond which Keegan has jumbled the view so that the street appears to be in the sky. Across from these collages, Keegan has cut out an aperture in the gallery wall — revealing three layers of sheetrock — into which he has placed a lush color photograph of a sunbeam piercing thick foliage. Kittycorner to it is a painting — or rather what appears to be a deconstruction of a painting, the canvas seeming to peel away, revealing the frame — by his friend, artist Richard Aldrich, whose recent show at nearby Bortolami gallery closed last week. The painting echoes the shape of the window in the collages. Across the room from Aldrich’s painting, leaning against a wall, is a life-size photograph of Keegan’s cat Neptune affixed to a thin sheet of aluminum, so that the cat appears to sit in the gallery. And on the reverse side of the Field of Dreams sheetrock is a large photograph of Keegan’s old apartment, sans construction work — a serene view of a gray couch and coffee table accented by the sunlight that streams through the windows.

Keegan is playing here with space both real (the cutout gallery wall) and remembered (the reference to Aldrich’s show, the scenes of the apartment in disarray). His work may at first glance seem heady and opaque, but one key to his concerns comes in an edition of 500 booklets he produced for the exhibition. Inside are images of buildings in varying degrees of completion, some veiled in scaffolding, often viewed from skewed angles or shown crisscrossed by shadows from other structures, such that they resolve into abstract studies of space. Bookending those photos are two reproduced articles, one from the New York Times that tells the story of an Atlanta builder whose re-creation of the White House has been threatened by foreclosure, the other a New Yorker “Talk of the Town” piece that asks what the city will look like in the wake of the subprime collapse, with its shuttered storefronts and “stillborn” construction sites. “What will become of the pits?” the article asks. “Can we turn them into half-wild swimming holes, like the granite quarries of New England? Ring them with barbed wire and convert them into debtors’ prisons or interment camps for the culprits who structured synthetic C.D.O.s?” In his collages, Keegan is subtly exploring themes of entropy and renewal — taking his super’s job one step further by tearing up the very fabric of his living room, and in so doing, showing how flimsy (just bricks and layers of sheetrock) a home really is. If it’s possible, he’s made a kind of subprime poetry.

Another hint lies in the artists who interest him. A prodigious curator — he did the programming for Andrew Kreps Gallery for several months in 2005 — and a sharp writer, two years ago Keegan penned an article for Modern Painters magazine about artists whose works “insist on memory in a space designed for forgetting, treat time in ways that extend beyond a 30-day exhibition cycle, and require the venue of viewing... to be activated over and over.” Something similar could be said of Keegan’s own exhibition, where his collages remix time and space, as the gallery itself is subtly transmogrified into a domestic setting.

Keegan is now teaching at the College of the Arts in California, but he was back in town long enough to install his work, attend his opening, and see some exhibitions. Here are his picks for the weekend in New York:

1. Xylor Jane: N.D.E. at Canada, through March 29 

“Xylor Jane’s paintings are something to experience in person — a jpeg will never suffice, and even the best reproduction will be unable to record the visual complexity of her math-informed and meticulously plotted works. She spent a year making the paintings for this show, and each work and each room of the gallery is clearly considered. Luke Murphy’s statement made available by Canada addresses the ‘painting structures’ that generate the work on view and how these various decisions are directly connected to Jane’s life. Murphy’s straightforward and readable text illuminates the layers of Jane’s rich and ongoing practice. The paintings in ‘N.D.E.’ have an optical vibration that emanates from numbers and math, but also contain a pulse deeply anchored in everyday life. 

2. House Call at Three’s Company, through March 23

“Your place or mine? Three’s Company is a by-appointment-only project based in Alex Gartenfeld and Piper Marshall’s Chinatown apartment (13 Allen St., #4, NY, NY, 10002, gallery@threescompany.tv). Currently, there is a group show titled ‘House Call’ featuring work by Richard Aldrich, Leigh Ledare, and Lisa Tan. Performances will be an important part of all exhibitions in the space; Aldrich, along with Amy Granat, inaugurated this practice on February 22. According to Alex, ‘Three’s Company will be open 12 months a year, by appointment only, but all plans are tentative. We have no budget.’”

3. Regift, curated by John Miller, at the Swiss Institute, through April 4 

“Jamie Isenstein’s Eggresses (prop) and Unbird (prop) are described as ‘props from an undisclosed television show about LGBT friends (both 2007).’ These props were made as likenesses of artworks that Jamie originally created and exhibited for a solo show at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. She was allowed to keep the prop versions of her artworks after (contractually) agreeing not to mention the show or network. I won’t mention them either. I will merely say that it rhymes with a show called The Hell Nerd, on a cable network that sounds like Go Time.”

4. The launch of Shannon Ebner’s The Sun as Error, The * as Error, The * as E//OR at White Columns, March 6

“It is always worth going by White Columns. Each and every room, vitrine, and surface is put to good use. If you missed the amazing 40th Anniversary show, stop by tonight for Shannon Ebner’s book launch, and go back for the next round of shows that start on March 10 and run until April 18.”

5. Manzoni: A Retrospective at Gagosian Gallery, through Mar 21

“William Pym said it best on Artforum.com: ‘The Piero Manzoni retrospective at this gallery surpasses a ‘definitive’ designation in such emphatic fashion that the casual qualifications for ‘museum-quality’ exhibitions in commercial spaces must now be rewritten.’” 

And watch out for…
6. Apartment Shows

“These events are co-organized by Denise Kupferschmidt and Joshua Smith in mainly Brooklyn-based apartments. Denise says she and Joshua ‘aren’t treating this as a curatorial project, but more of an one-night event that will stay current and in-the-now.’ They ‘will do it every month or so until we’re tired of doing it, which hopefully is a long time from now.’ Their next (yet-to-be-titled) show will take place on Sunday, March 15, at S. 3rd and Roebling, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and will include work by Ann Craven, Mariah Robertson, and Peter Coffin, among others.”

Sarah Douglas is Staff Writer at Art+Auction.