Richard Keely and Anna O’Cain

Gunpowder Mandala/Hair of the Dog

December 10, 2005 – January 29, 2006

O’Cain and Keely have set up a worktable and will continue to make mandalas in the gallery on a weekly basis for the duration of the exhibition. The designs and the working process are influenced by mandala production from various cultures and include patterns and drawings of symbols, signs and military target diagrams calling attention to the implications of our individual and collective decisions affecting the world at this time. Scheduled hours of mandala production are Dec. 16, 2005 through Jan. 25, 2006. Call for times.

Richard Keely

Richard Keely is an artist and educator from southern California. Originally trained as a painter Richard’s work during the last ten years has turned towards sculpture and installation. With the sculptural work Richard is concerned with transforming ordinary objects into visually dense wall pieces that evoke an array of emotive possibilities. Richard's Installation projects have been collaborations with San Diego artists Lynn Hendrick and Anna O’Cain. With these installations Keely, Hendrick, and O’Cain explore ideas concerning the visceral side of accumulating, storing, preserving, and communicating ideas and information. Richard’s work has a national reputation including Two recent solos exhibitions at gallery 4016 in Los Angeles and CAD/XO Gallery in Chicago and recent collaborations with Anna O’Cain at Art Around Adams and the Spruce Street Forum in San Diego. Additional collaborations with O'Cain include INSITE 2000 in San Diego and a Ceremonial performance at Beyond Baroque in Los Angeles. Additionally Richard was a “Visiting Artist” at Oberlin College and Montana State University and has been awarded a grant from Art Matters in New York. Richard has traveled extensively throughout Europe, Asia, and Africa and has lived and studied Chinese painting in Taipei, Taiwan. Currently Richard is living in San Diego CA and is an Assistant Professor of Art at San Diego State University, where he teaches sculpture for the School of Art Design and Art History.

Anna O’Cain

Anna O'Cain is a San Diego based artist who was born in Pascagoula, Mississippi where she returns home yearly to visit with family and friends, catch up on stories, changes in the landscape and to enjoy the foods of the Gulf Coast. Recently, artist Richard Keely and Anna O’Cain traveled to Pascagoula with abundant assistance from California friends who donated money and supplies for Hurricane Katrina victims in her hometown. They are currently developing an installation and photographic book with Pascagoula historian Renee Gautier and her sister Elizabeth O’Cain of Pascagoula as a storytelling record of this tremendous natural and national disaster. She currently teaches studio art in the Art Department at Mira Costa College. She studied art for two years at Oklahoma University, moved to Chicago where completed her studies and received a BFA from the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1980 she moved to La Jolla where she studied and received an MFA in Visual Art from the University of California San Diego. No one could have ever convinced her that she would find California to become her home. Anna is a recent recipient of a public art commission with artist Richard Keely for a park in Carlsbad, California. She has received grants from the California Arts Council and Art Matters in New York City and residencies from the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming and the Djerassi Foundation near Palo Alto, California.

Anna finds events, materials, and the speech of everyday life to be the most vibrant source of inspiration. Her installations often address how we learn things, what we remember, what we forget and reconfigure in our personal stories. She is a collector of images, objects, and stories from daily life and continues to find great pleasure in making the ordinary extraordinary

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