Keith Ballard is an interdisciplinary artist and CalArts alumni based in Claremont, California, working across woodworking, video, painting, and performance. His practice is a rigorous interrogation of the contemporary suburban milieu, mining pop culture, drug use, and punk iconography to expose profound themes of alienation and trauma. Though the work possesses a crucial element of humor, it remains absent of jokes. Ballard employs himself as a strategic simulacrum, creating work designed to examine the mechanisms of white male violence inherent in these cultural spaces.
Winnie the Pooh:
A Biker Opera
Winnie the Pooh, Peter Pan, an old cowboy, my dad and lots of little boys appear together in this vague but playfully perverted tale of anxiety, gay sex and happy endings. Winnie the Pooh: A Biker Opera is a coming of age film about love and love lost. It is a soap opera, a documentary and a musical smooshed together in a disjointed narrative.
Dunes- The Minnow and The Machine
music video directed by Keith Ballard
Selected Screenings, Performances & Exhibitions
2024 – Keithchella, Precariat, Los Angeles, CA
2024 – Broke Ass Mountain, Precariat, Los Angeles, CA
2020 – KAAA Takeover, O’ Projects Space, Los Angeles, CA
2019 – The Violence Show, O’ Projects Space, Los Angeles, CA
2018 – Empathetic Facts by Apathetic Creatures, Spring-Break Art Show, Los Angeles, CA
2018 – LYX, Oslo Prosjektrom, Oslo, Norway
2017 – Accidentally on Purpose, Panel, Los Angeles, CA
2015 – AFTERGLOW, Pieter Performance Space, Los Angeles, CA
2012 – Winnie the Pooh: A Biker Opera, Dilettante, Los Angeles, CA
2012 – Dunes Music Videos, Ace Hotel, Palm Springs, CA
2011 – Stare Into the Videoscope: The “Macho Man” Randy Savage Story, ACME Gallery, Los
Angeles, CA
2011 – Love in the Real World, Spectacle Theatre, Brooklyn, NY
2011 – Epilogues: Another Positivist (trans)formation, Periwinkle Cinema, San Francisco, CA