ON OUR RADAR | HAPPENINGS | CABANA MAGAZINE
New York-based artist Keelin Montzingo talks Sophie Goodwin through her creative life, from the first artworks she tentatively shared online, to her artistic process, which led to an inspired collaboration with Olympia Le-Tan.
INTERVIEW BY SOPHIE GOODWIN | HAPPENINGS | 10 NOVEMBER 2024
I have been painting for as long as I can remember. After college I found myself working in interior design and I was fascinated by the way people curated their homes and integrated objects and artworks into their lives. I enjoyed the work but I found myself longing to make the paintings that were in the houses, rather than curating collections of artworks for people. Around the same time, I was taken under the wing of a painter and found the confidence to start sharing my own work.
I shared an image of one of my paintings online. My career seemed to take off and I haven’t turned back. I am constantly studying and developing my practice, I have been part of artist critic groups and had a number of mentors along the way.
I live in Soho, NY, with my husband. Soho is such an exciting place to live, it still maintains that vibrant artistic culture that it became known for in the 60s. I have a home studio where I work on small pieces, but find it's crucial for me to travel to a different environment to work. Joining a studio last year was a great shift for my practice and allowed me to start making more ambitious large-scale works.
I try to go to my studio every day. It's in Mana Contemporary, which is an extraordinarily vibrant artist collective in Jersey City filled with inspiring creatives working across every possible medium. Within the space there are galleries exhibiting major works of art. When I leave my studio I’ll visit one of the galleries and try to catch up with the other artists to keep constantly engaged with the unique community around me.
My paintings are a balance between intuitive, abstract process-led pieces and meticulously planned out elements. So, I often have no idea what will unfold. Sometimes I’ll spend several weeks building up background layers before placing any figures. I work on multiple paintings at once, so it feels like I’m surrounded by a dozen stories, all coming to life in different ways. I love many artists but some I always return to for inspiration are Matisse, De Kooning, Cecily Brown and Tom Wesselmann, between them they capture many of the themes I care about.
Living in New York feeds a part of my soul. I love the multiculturalism of the city, the way it's a nexus point for so many languages, philosophies and diverse life experiences. Every day is exciting, filled with hope and surprises.
My home is very minimalist and inspired by Japanese principles of design. But in many ways I’m a maximalist and love to be surrounded by bold colors, patterns and textiles. In the future I can imagine my home being much more vibrant but now the part of me that seeks that, draws inspiration from traveling and staying in different environments. I think the way I live is very similar to the way I paint, an endless push and pull between precision and abstraction.
Kenya has my heart. I've been captivated by the landscapes of East Africa for years, taking every possible opportunity to travel there and exist in the wilderness. My husband and I are involved in a number of conservation projects in East Africa.
The natural beauty of the African savannah feels so ancient and untouched. It is truly humbling to spend time in lands that are still rich with nature but it’s a stark reminder of how much of the natural world has already been lost across the planet. It’s hard to be there and not be filled with a sense of urgency to protect these crucial ecosystems, which still exist in their fullness. The people there are also so special, and so deeply connected to the land, they remind me how important it is to center the regeneration and protection of the Earth at the core of our values.
Olympia Le-Tan always stood out to me as a unique brand, which occupies an interesting space between personal adornments and art objects. I love the way they approach fashion through the lens of art and literature, elevating a functional item into something else entirely. One of the themes my work explores is the way women are presented in fashion and how that reflects back on how we see ourselves in day-to-day life. It appealed to me to work with OLT on creating a collection which was both a provoking artwork and a beautiful yet functional object.
It was important to showcase the collection with a launch event in New York. As an artist your work is mainly made in isolation, and you only see how people receive it at an exhibition or opening. I wanted to invite people to experience the collection, and see how the pieces interact with different people in reality. I also worked on a large scale painting specifically for the launch event and was fascinated to see how people related to the painting in context to the bags.
The past few years as I’ve been traveling and researching. I've been preparing to move into a new body of work, which brings together my interest in the connection between the way we perceive the female body and the way we treat the land. The more I think about it the more I see a fundamental connection between how we have become severed from nature and, at the same time, created more and more artificial ideas of what it means to be feminine.
I visited Antarctica last year. I made large scale photographic prints of the melting ice-sheets. The next series of works brings together these photographs with female bodies unraveling with the contours of the landscapes. This current OLT collection has also really made me think about how I can incorporate more multidisciplinary collaborations into my work outside of the conventional art trajectory. It’s exciting to imagine how new works might explore other media and become more immersive.
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