Chase Keetley
Chase Keetley
Portrait, 2020
March 2021
Chase Keetley is a multi-disciplinary African Canadian artist whose work is based in the Black Experience. He primarily investigates the mimicry and use of Blackness, such as the appropriation of cultural practices and iconography rooted in the Pan-African Ethnography. Keetley’s practice breaks down the identities, desires, and investments of non-Black people and how they live vicariously through Black Culture without actively dismantling the issues that coincide within its existence.
As a Black artist Keetley is constantly confronted by our nation’s choice to exclude Black people from Canadian history. Important information about Black Canadians’ work and their personal history has been omitted. In Keetley’s 2018 project “Ofcourse”, fragments of this information are recorded and inserted into his paintings and sculptural pieces. The unearthing of hidden truths evokes emotional responses from the viewer, intentionally undoing the Canadian palimpsest. “Ofcourse” was inspired by the removal and revival of Hogan’s Alley, Vancouver’s first historic Black neighborhood, demolished circa 1971. Keetley is now continuing his research into Black people migrating en masse from San Francisco to Victoria on the 17th of April 1858.
In the summer of 2018 Keetley launched Black Arts Vancouver, a community organisation whose mission is to further the artistic expression of Pan-African Youth in Vancouver. Now in their second year, Black Arts Vancouver facilitates workshops and provides their community with information about Black people in British Columbia. In the beginning, Keetley and co-founder Berlynn Beam had trouble finding substantial information about African-Canadian historical figures to teach to the Black, Brown, and Indigenous youth they service. Since then, Keetley has dedicated a majority of his practice to the research on British Columbia’s Black history. Black Arts Vancouver provides secure spaces for Vancouver’s Black youth to not only learn about themselves, but where they stand in history apart from the white settler narrative.
