Dissonant Works proudly welcomes Maureen Keaveny as our first artist-in-residence. We invite you to experience her series, Dichotomies, in our ever-evolving creative community space. 

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Dichotomies is a photographic exploration shot across desert landscapes that captures the desert not only as a physical terrain but as a conceptual site of contradiction where absence holds presence, stillness implies motion, and vastness coexists with intimacy. Through stark compositions, manipulations and uncanny textures, the images interrogate the paradoxes of survival, isolation, and transformation. They reveal the desert as a mirror to contemporary anxieties where the sublime beauty of the environment is haunted by both memory and myth.

 

Dichotomies is a project born from disruption. It is an attempt to fracture the image so that its former identity becomes only a remnant. The works begin with photographs of the desert, once captured as singular, stable records of place. Through a series of digital manipulations and physical rearrangements, the original reference dissolves. The images come from the world but no longer belong to it. The remains become unpictured and non-images. They are now hybrid terrains, suspended between nature and simulation, memory and the uncanny.

 

The installation emphasizes fragmentation across both image and space. Large intact prints confront each other on opposing walls, suggesting a binary architecture. Smaller prints, once a single image, have been split in two and one half is placed far from its counterpart, separated across the room. The viewer instinctively tries to reconcile these fragments, stitching them together in “memory space.” But the mental reconstruction is flawed. It is an imagined whole that never matches the physical reality. A gap persists, both optical and cognitive. 

 

A further tension arises from an insistent formal binary in that some images are contained within visible borders, held in and framed while others are printed full-bleed, pushing outward as if resisting containment. The oscillation between confinement and overflow amplifies the instability of meaning.

 

Viewers often call the work “otherworldly.” The eeriness lies not in fear but in ontological instability in which the sense that once-familiar landscapes have slipped loose from certainty.

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Maureen is a visual artist based in St. Louis, MO, working across sculpture, installation, and photography. Her practice explores the uncanny intersections of primordial nature, synthetic structures, and the human psyche. Using everyday materials, she reflects on the surreal textures of contemporary life, shaped by ecological, psychological, and social crises. She earned her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2007. Her work has been featured nationally in both solo and group exhibitions, primarily in experimental and artist-run spaces.

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This program is supported in part by a grant from:

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