In order to maintain connections after relocating to Charlotte, Holly Keogh’s family mailed photographs back and forth with relatives in England. To create her paintings, the artist, a first generation American, draws from these images, including cousins’ birthday parties she never attended and homes she never visited. She says, “I can’t bring them any closer, I can’t reconstruct the original moments in time. My desire to capture the appearance of moments that keep retreating or disappearing, manifests itself in blurred, faded, or distorted portraits.”

With these images as a starting point, Keogh’s paintings live in the space between memory and projection; they are as familiar and real as they are foreign and imagined, much like our own imperfect memories.

The works on view in True Likeness draw on silent film reels shot by Keogh’s grandfather using a Bolex Super 8 in the 1960s and ’70s. Focusing on portraits, the final paintings are the result of two layers of distillation—first by Keogh’s grandfather, who initially aimed the camera at his subjects, primarily members of his family, to capture linear, short narratives, and later by Keogh herself, as she pauses the film to extract specific moments, glances, and expressions of particular people, freezing them within their environs. The work becomes a collaboration of sorts, with Keogh reimagining family members from a time before she was alive. Keogh’s choice to portray her subjects with a soft focus alludes to both the motion inherent in her original source material as well as the passing of time and shifting nature of identity.

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