Unfurling across the gallery space like a spool of 35mm film, Somehow, Somewhere, Someway evokes the diaristic quality of a scrapbook or home movie, albeit one in which the central through-line of the narrator is absent, making room for the viewer to play the protagonist of these paintings, to recognize the majesty of minor moments and possess them ourselves.

Each work is titled by the timestamp of the picture they are based on followed by descriptive captions, evoking the qualities of a scrapbook, albeit one in which the central through-line, the narrating subject, is absent. The intimately scaled works unfurl across the gallery space like a spool of 35mm film, beckoning the viewer to physically engage by luring them closer.

Exploring ways of conveying what the act of looking feels like, Keep trains her attention on the magnificence of micro-experiences; the flare of sun rays breaking through the forest, the quiet avalanche of rumpled bed sheets, the twinkling condensation of an untouched negroni against a glistening zinc bar—rendering them with gratifying tactility in sumptuous strokes of oil paint.

Claudia Keep's practice probes what the French Oulipian writer, Georges Perec, termed the ‘infra-ordinary’: the myriad infinitesimal moments, versus the “the big event, the untoward, the extraordinary,” that ultimately constitutes life and suffuses it with meaning.

The artist likens her paintings to the cinematic experience of staring out the window of a moving car while listening to a poignant song, feeling oneself awash in the heightened drama of the hyperreal, the minor event–the soupy space where our most intimate and banal thoughts are projected like a voiceover onto the glowing blur of city lights whooshing by.

While reminiscent of On Kawara’s conceptual Date Paintings, Keep is primarily concerned with the sensuous and somatic. Her inspiration is drawn from film and street photography, William Eggleston’s Polaroids for example, that are deceptively nonchalant yet pulse with the truth and directness of life. Referencing Baudelaire, Keep’s images seek to “extract the eternal from the ephemeral” by recovering in her compositions “the light and movement of life” that defines “the present.”

Rendered in sumptuous strokes of oil on masonite, her paintings experiment with ways of conveying what the act of looking feels like. Intimate in scale, they physically beckon the viewer closer, inviting them to infuse these familiar yet generic scenes with their own experience and memories. The tactility of Keep’s tableaux, achieved by a rapid wet-on-wet application technique, further extends this line of inquiry.

The works on view can be parsed into distinct temporal categories: anticipation (the twinkling condensation of an untouched negroni against a glistening zinc bar), suspension (like the flare of sun rays breaking through the forest, a bolt of lightning mid-strike, insects caught in rare moments of repose), and trace, (the quiet avalanche of rumpled bed sheets, or a plate of orange rinds), wherein the main action, or event, is implied but not shown.

This recalls the alchemy of the cinematic technique of montage: the juxtaposition of two inert frames that produce a third in the mind of the viewer, in which the action takes place.