08/07/25

Shelagh Keeley @ The Power Plant, Toronto - "Film Notebooks 1985-2017" Exhibition

Shelagh Keeley 
Film Notebooks 1985-2017
The Power Plant, Toronto
Through September 14, 2025

Shelagh Keeley
Shelagh Keeley 
Still from Jardim do Ultramar / The Colonial Garden, 
Lisbon, Portugal, 2016
Film, 180 min 
Thanks to the Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon, Portugal 
and ifa-Galerie Stuttgart, Germany
© Shelagh Keeley, Courtesy the artist

At the core of Shelagh Keeley’s work is a drawing practice based on an intuitive and embodied response to readings and research in poetry, politics, cinema, and architecture. The artist applies the same approach to her work with film, where the moving image becomes a drawing notebook, a travel journal, an opportunity to bring the viewer into the spaces experienced by the artist and mediated through the lens of the hand-held camera. Since 1985, Shelagh Keeley has documented on film her encounters with gardens and uniquely built environments around the world. The resulting film notebooks quietly, yet poignantly, reveal the layered histories and contexts that created them at different moments in time. From the flamboyant artificiality of a desert oasis in Las Vegas to the discipline of a Zen Garden in Kyoto, and from a colonial garden in Lisbon to the largest European zoological-botanical garden in Stuttgart, the films invite us to contemplate the complexity and intangible essence–genius loci or spirit of the place–Shelagh Keeley felt in these places. Filmed while walking for hours at a time as a flâneuse, the moving image notebooks present an invitation for the viewer to become the artist as she draws with the camera, investigating and uncovering the visceral, hidden layers of these locations.

Curator: Adelina Vlas, Head of Curatorial Affairs

THE POWER PLANT Contemporary Art Gallery
231 Queens Quay West, Toronto, Ontario M5J2G8

Shelagh Keeley: Film Notebooks 1985-2017
The Power Plant, Toronto, April 11 - September 14, 2025