Plastic Metaphysics

More than a substance, plastic is the very idea of its infinite transformation… —Roland Barthes, 1957

Keith T. Monda’s photographs overlay the duration of movement through space and the stasis of the instant, capturing the image and its afterimage within a single frame. The brightly colored trails mark the simultaneous presence and absence of the subjects that pass before the lens (butterflies, balls, assorted plastic toys), emphasizing the transitional, transitory, plastic aspects of the objects and events they register. The frenzied arcs of the light, the product of Monda’s process-honed technique and sense of spontaneity and wit, balance Brownian motion with the precision and intentionality of paintbrush strokes.

“Youngsters,” a companion to his large-scale performance piece “Lullaby,” at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in December 2005, features photographs and paintings that find common origin in several small-scale kinetic sculptures of colorful hand-painted cork balls, plastic paperclips, tiddly winks, and beads, all suspended with wire and stored in jars. Monda’s approach to his selected media further develops an expanded notion of plastic. His sculptures, photographs, and paintings bend toward each other, cohering through a shared gestural economy that registers the interactions of the artist’s body and the materials. This unique visual vocabulary—vacillating between painterly inscription, sculptural touch, and dance—constitutes Monda’s signature move, his signature movement.

“Youngsters” playfully inaugurates relationships between motion and stasis, ephemerality and duration, form and formlessness, concretion and abstraction, orchestration and contingency, the plastic arts and the art of plasticity. These pieces become plastic in multiple senses of the word -- a noun (a substance ontologically defined by synthesis and mutability) and an adjective (a quality whose essential characteristic is pliability) -- yet they also produce something in excess of their forms. “Youngsters” examines the physics of plastics—the material properties of luminescence, motion, and substance—but also evokes a metaphysics of plastics, a plastic metaphysics concerned with the creation of possibilities, with pure becoming.

Monda’s plastics make an art of infinite transformation: sculpture becomes photography becomes painting becomes dance, stillness reveals its motion, the ordinary becomes extraordinary, and everyday objects become an opportunity to see anew, to see differently, and in a sense, an invitation to dream.

James Leo Cahill
Los Angeles, 2006






In the world of conceptual visual art, it often is difficult to strike a balance between humorlessness and superficiality, between ponderous weight and disposable one-liners. Of course, much work skips the balancing act altogether and strains like grim Atlas to support the Big Idea, or flits without rest like a nervous stand-up comic from punch line to punch line.

Keith Monda's "Youngsters" are a beautiful example of what can happen when the artist succeeds in synthesizing these spirits into a whole. You'll find ideas here (even Big Ideas, if you look closely), but offered with a wink and a smile and an invitation to have fun with them. You'll find good humor as well, the kind that welcomes you into a circle of laughing friends, rather than a knowing nudge in the ribs. In short, you'll find playfulness. And what a joy it is to play!

Like the fairies and sprites alluded to in some of the titles, these colorful collections enshrined in glass yearn to draw us into dances and dreams of magic and possibility. As with all play-mates, though, their moods can be mercurial -- glimpses of gloominess, perverse rebelliousness, even a sad wistfulness may be rare, but inevitable. Monda captures these moments on canvas and paper, each image capturing an aspect of these personalities as if securing a single facet from a diamond.

Many of these images read as portraits, both posed and candid. Has the artist created personas beyond his direct control? Sometimes it seems as if these spirited characters have used him to bring themselves forth. Monda talks about developing an "infallible technique" and giving oneself over to it; fallible or not, these works shine with a light of their own.

Brandon G Volbright
Brooklyn, 2007






Encounter Culture

Keith Monda’s “Youngsters” find a sense of unity in his attention to the wonder of the encounter. His characteristic sensitivity to the ways materials and ideas come together energizes the whole of his work. It suffuses the collections of tiny treasures in his jars, the motions and colors held in suspended animation in his photographs, and the choreography of figuration and abstraction, surface and depth, sheen and texture, and difference and repetition in his monotypes and paintings. The encounters within each work get amplified by the conversations that happen between works and across sibling mediums—emphasizing family resemblances even as they accentuate individual distinctiveness.

“Youngsters” emphasize the transformative power of the encounter. Monda’s jars recall the poetry of found objects placed together in Joseph Cornell’s boxes. Like Cornell’s boxes, they transform utilitarian containers into enchanted repositories of child-like wonder. Monda’s work also claims ancestors in Yayoi Kusama’s “Dots Obsession” and “Infinity Nets” bodies, as well as Louise Bourgeois’ sculptures, whose influence seems particularly striking in Monda’s copper spiders and dunce caps. Similar to Kusama and Bourgeois, Monda’s pieces elicit the latent components of hallucination and fantasy from the spaces they occupy.

“Youngsters” are particularly attuned to how they relate to the spaces they come to inhabit. They populate—but never colonize—the environments they help realize. These pieces are meant to be lived with, finding their finishing touches in the patina of their encounters (never singular) with the beholder. “Youngsters” invite a reorientation of perception aimed at re-encountering aspects of the sensuous world obfuscated by preconception, habit, and necessity. Monda’s “Youngsters” make art of these encounters, cultivating them, creating a wonderful encounter culture.

To be sure, Monda works in an idiom distinctly his own. He speaks about his “Youngsters” as evoking non-Euclidian experiences of space. They create for him “zones of other-worldliness”: a process of monda-lisation, as the French might say. The wit and word-play of Monda’s often allusive titles—“The Us in Me” or “Heroes of the Footnote,” for example—precipitate a move into Lewis Carroll-esque “zones of other wordliness.” No mere labels, his titles testify to the animating power of language while also animating a language all their own, analogous to Monda’s unique visual vocabulary. When encountered, “Youngsters: A Million Single Moments” surely speaks for itself, and has plenty to say.


James Leo Cahill
Paris, 2007