Niki Keenan Meteor Flower in the Astral Islands, 2025
Acrylic on canvas, gauze, and plaster with metal frame
15 x 9 x 7.5 feet
Presented by AMcE Creative Arts, Booth B10
Niki Keenan paints and sculpts spaces she wants to inhabit. Her painted sculptures are adorned with Pacific Northwest imagery of her home: forests, waterways, gardens, underwater creatures and stellar nurseries. The work reflects on the power and intelligence inherent in our forests. It explores the phenomena of a nurse log where a tree falls and a new tree grows, using its nutrients. The nurse log decays leaving a void in the surrounding root system for light to find its way. This window effect is found in her delicate canvas and gauze pieces as they weave together a moment that could feel fleeting or a moment that has limitless possibility. The lightness of the material, even see-through in some areas, allows the viewer to imagine floating through the scene themselves, through the void of the nurse log, connected to nebula above.
Meteor Flower on the Astral Islands is a diptych, one part rests on the floor while the other is suspended from the ceiling. The above/below orientation reflects her interest and curiosity around connection and the present moment. The meeting of two people, or the meeting of our interior parts or even the meeting of celestial and terrestrial is a space that requires the present moment. This vital place where two parts meet can be described but more easily felt and she imagines a relationship where the upper part represents infinity and the lower part receives and reflects the infinite in continuous conversation, meeting each other in the now.
Artist Bio
Niki holds a B.F.A. in painting from the University of Oregon, graduating Summa Cum-Laude in 2003. She lives and works in Rainier Beach, Seattle, WA.
Her work has been exhibited nationally and is featured in the permanent collections of the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance and the State of New Mexico. Her recent large-scale installation “Meeting Place” was exhibited at the San Juan Islands Museum of Art. She is represented by AMcE Creative Arts and SAM Gallery in Seattle.