EVENT: Keyes photographs different pages in certain books and then superimposes them into one ethereal image. At G. Gibson Gallery, 122 S Jackson St, Suite 200, 587-4033. Through May 26.
What is your continuum of ideas? There's a kind of X-ray quality, like you're looking into the heart of the book. Or the Sugimoto catalogue, which gives you a kind of interpretation of his art. "I try to let the idea of the book come out--it's a very random process. Sometimes the books, like the Sugimoto, people who work in a very serial way, sometimes their work is more representative in the photograph. A lot of it has to do with the way that the book is laid out, the way it's designed. It's a lot of different people's ideas coming together, not just the artist's or writer's. I do graphic design for a living, so I'm attracted to the design of the book as well as its ideas."
It doesn't seem like a random process when you look at them. It feels deliberate--you're carefully picking the pages you want to photograph. "Half the work is trying to pick which pages will add up to the whole idea, the most important parts. Because you can't always physically photograph the whole book--although I have done that, with 40 or 50 double-page spreads. I'm more interested in the way they're all connected to each other than in the individual ideas. I think that bringing them down to the same level, using the same process, plays up the similarities and differences between everything."
Has anything surprised you about the connections? "A lot of it is intuitive. I'm interested in the relationship between science and art. Like The Cat in the Hat Comes Back--he defies all these laws of physics in the stuff he does, and it's just a children's book, but there are a lot of subtleties. And then the Stephen Hawking book. I paired them together because they seem worlds apart, but the more you know about those fields the more similar they seem."
