Thy Welling

For nearly four hundred years, a sentence from Descartes has organized how we locate the self: “I think, therefore I am.” Keegan Carter’s exhibition turns that sentence over: I feel, therefore I know. Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, which holds that the lived body is where we first perceive, understand, and engage the world, the exhibition asks where intelligence begins. The mind questions; the body answers. Across eleven works, Carter proposes that brilliance begins in the body, and that we have been crediting the wrong source.

Keegan Carter (b. 1992) is a Los Angeles–based visual artist exploring self-concept through textures and layering techniques, working in amate, resin, and wood. He came to painting as an adult, developing his practice in tandem with a career in big tech.

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