Jenny Keith: Keep Them Safe

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Jenny Keith, "Caribou," 2022

acrylic on board, 48" x 60”

Virtual tours with curator – Thursday March 17 and Friday April 1, at noon 

Edmonton’s Jenny Keith brings her beautiful signature style to the Art Gallery of St. Albert in her feature vault exhibition Keep Them Safe. Three large scale paintings showcase three endangered Alberta animals: a woodland caribou, a grizzly bear and a whooping crane. 

Keith trained at the University of Alberta, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting and sculpture. Her detailed paintings are a labour of love, combining her finely crafted artistic skills with her life-time fascination with the natural world. Keith finds wonder in the outdoors, from the joy of spotting wildlife in city parks and local river valleys, to the quiet splendor of venturing into Alberta’s wild places.

The works in Keep Them Safe highlight the complex and intertwined relationships that animals, plants and insects share within their ecosystems. Before working on her pieces, Keith took care to learn everything she could about her chosen animal subjects – their habitat, range, and diet, as well as the other creatures and plants that share the same space. In Keith's beautifully balanced artworks the central animals are surrounded by the key species that they rely on, or which rely on them. All of Keith’s detailed creatures are lively and active. But they are entangled with the fate of their central animal - nearly all the species that Keith chose to include are currently threatened or endangered.

Each of Keith’s works tells the story of a fragile place. Tucked inside the Gallery’s vault exhibition space, Keith hopes to foster a spirit of wonder and conservation, inspiring others to do what they can to keep all these creatures safe for future generations. 

Keep Them Safe will be on display in the vault until April 16.