On Finding My Yacht
Mayce Keeler, Untitled, 2023, acrylic and spray paint on canvas, 44 x 44 in. Photo: Daniel Lang
[Image description: A large pink dog with a yellow creature clasped between its jaws. Three blue birds fly around the edges of the painting.]
by Anira Abreu
Whenever I encounter a painting by the artist Mayce Keeler, I get this addictive feeling that is mostly unpleasant. I feel embarrassed by my path that is so easily written by my company—I am humiliated by the truth glaring back at me. This is what I felt during my first encounter with the green painting. The piece is untitled, but Mayce calls it Someday I’ll Get My Yacht, just for her. Just for her. Just for her!
Everything I have done since I was a teenager has been with the idea of someone else as my highest priority. To impress them. To keep them. To validate myself. All for the high of the ride, or perhaps to stay on their ride? I have no sense of when it’s time to get off the metaphorical bus that is someone else’s company, to sit somewhere else. I feel indebted to having the privilege of a seat in the first place. But Mayce has a sense of radical courage that calls out the characters we all play here on earth. In this painting, the premise is, “A fool taken for a ride.”
Mayce’s oeuvre depicts a cast of characters accompanied by their moral dilemmas, they rotate and cycle with vibrant raw emotion. These chimeras connect person and creature, in states accessible to both fauna and humans. Mayce's subjects explore their own selfish ambitions, and find themselves experiencing incorporeal and corporeal anxieties.
Her images dance and cower, hungry to interact, toe the precipice of violence and lust. They are impulsive and honest, stripped to the bone of human and animal hedonism, where they run from pain and chase the bounty of pleasure. Gallivanting to the foreground of their enclosed paintings as if they are standing center stage, wailing, fearful of divine retribution. Mayce's art exists within a tempestuous folklore that positions its own bare vulnerability against a vast historic mythos. It is a primeval renaissance in response to contemporary socio-cultural norms.
In the “Green Painting,” you will find an inequality of power at play between the subjects. There’s the fool, unrealistically narrating their own hopes and dreams in a dire situation. It’s only a matter of time before they get what they want. Otherwise, what does all this pain mean in the end? I will get rich. Buy that yacht. I’m paying my dues for the big bucks, just like my predator. Isn’t that the way? It is these imprudent thoughts that move them into the mouth of the dog in the first place. The dog has no intention of giving them what they want, and even less what they need. The dog is simply taking. And the fool gives, gives, gives.
Keeler’s works are as poignant as they are humorous. You can’t help but laugh at this bright yellow creature delusionally thinking, “You know what? I will get out of this, okay! The jaws of the big dog aren’t that bad. I mean, I’m still here after all?” You feel strong because you are able to withstand the danger, you stand, not devoured—yet.
The dog, the boss and CEO. My president that barks and bites in the dark when you ask for anything at all. The historical big-wig moneybags that seal our fate. They direct and we play. For what, our reward? No. You’re lucky that you get the scraps if you survive this painful coexistence!
The other birds. Here they are, watching it all unfold. Not here to save their fellow animals that get caught in the trap of the carrot dangling for them. The birds wait like protons swirling, like this is what they were born to do, it’s been written before. To observe while their very own is eaten in front of them. Why the affected stagnation? Is anyone going to form their own shape in this cruel pattern that repeats itself? Does ignorance taste just as good as harmony to them?
I’m trying to be that person. The one who knows when to leave. My teeth are soft and gummy, like la tierra, the clay of the earth. I can be with the birds that are not here to help me sharpen my teeth, but perhaps among them, I can find my own shape in the sky as my body hardens and burns and burns in the heat of it all. My skin is becoming too thick to pierce, and I stop saying “I don’t know” when I know perfectly well. And if I find my yacht, I will be the anchor for I hold my own weight now.