We were lucky to catch up with Mayce Keeler recently and have shared our conversation below.

Mayce, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

My meaningful project has not been completed. It is a growing compendium of a visual dictionary, where animals, beasts, humans, and the melding of all three give way to a symbolism and allegories that are both continuous and nonsequential. Growing with these symbols is a conduit to explore a vast array of personal experiences and sentiments.

Mayce, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

At the core of my artmaking is a compulsive nature to meld the human and animal world. I think too often we think of ourselves as superseding our earthly neighbors, going above our animal classification. Recently these thoughts have circled the idea of our strongest emotions – fear, anger, lust, and how we share them. The familial and bodily comfort of touch and closeness, the overwhelming emotions that push us forward and make us pace relentlessly like a tiger in a cage. For me these are the most powerful emotions, perhaps because we share these with animals, and both us and them have been developing them for millennia’s of time. As far as we feel from our roots, they are our foundation and in our DNA. When individuals feel emotional in a way that “makes them human”, I tend to disagree. To me it feels closer to animalian. To be intertwined in lust, swimming in the ocean, dancing in a crowd, to commune with others yet not say a thing, this all ascends me to a state of animalistic being and not “above” it. Images of purposeful melding of beastial and human characteristics spring from this thought and take stage on their painting supports of panel or canvas – quarreling, converging, and entangling with each other.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

The reward comes in bringing personal deep-seated, cryptic, and unconscious inklings to life. Although, as embarrassing as it can be at times, there is an abundance of moments people have responded to a painting with the exact thing I am struggling with the most – even when I think my emotions are obscured and carefully camouflaged. The emotional release when I have nailed a particular concept is a bear rearing on its hind legs to finally scratch against a tree in the desert.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

The goal of my journey is to get the inside out. My mission is to answer (or maybe better – just contemplate visually) this list of growing questions:

What emotions are your strongest emotions? Are complex emotions less strong because of evolution? Are our strongest emotions our oldest emotions? When driven to the brink, how do our anxieties make us act? With our evolving world of today, how do the stripping of our reproductive rights sit in our bodies? Are we afraid of what our bodies can do? Are we shameful of our wants? Are our wants immoral, are they self-serving? Is it bad to submit to our bodily desires? Hunger, elation, lust? When we are, is it god or the devil against us (or our nature)? Could it be both? Is laying in the sun as neutral as being laid? Do we experience a reverence for god when we love others? Or is it sin that drives us to indulge physically?

Contact Info:

• Website: www.maycekeeler.com
• Instagram: @supermundanebodies @keelercat