Keegan O’Rourke was born on August 31st 1988 at around 8:30AM, and grew up in the Pacific Northwest of America. From an early age his strongest interests were in the landscapes and architecture of his surroundings, and these forms have remained a primary source of inspiration in his work. In his youth, Keegan's passion for the building of new worlds found its outlet in Legos, map-making, and three-dimensional level design. As Keegan witnessed and gained access to more spaces in the wilderness and the city, photography became his path towards developing a vision of the world around him. Philosophy, history, and science—methods of understanding one’s place in the landscape— also became necessary considerations. In his representational drawings and digital paintings these themes would often take on the shape of metaphor and symbolism, but in an attempt to further merge his often diametrical modes of expression (one political, the other meditative) Keegan moved into non-representational painting with a series titled "Surfacing". Keegan began this way of working in the summer of 2008, has had three college-associated group shows in which he exhibited both paintings and photography, and is currently beginning his second body of work, "Emergence", at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. Emergence deals with representation of imaginative formations rather than literal objects, so his process is still largely intuitive. However, as form is defined more specifically in these works comapared to his non-representational painting, Keegan's photography-developed vision can emerge more directly.