Kim Keeveer: Sunset, 2007

pigment print, 31 x 48" Edition of 6

THE PERFECT STORM

Opening reception, Thursday, June 28, 6 to 8 pm

Kim Keever is showing with Tom Berenz, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Julie Heffernan, Bill Jacobson, Simen Johan, Sarah Anne Johnson, Shai Kremer, Lori Nix,
Karin Apollonia Müller and Yuki Shingai
curated by Edna Cardinale
June 28 - August 17, 2012

KIM KEEVER's large-scale photographs are created by meticulously constructing miniature topographies in a 200-gallon tank, which is then filled with water. These dioramas of fictitious environments are brought to life with colored lights and the dispersal of pigment, producing ephemeral atmospheres that he must quickly capture with his large-format camera.

Keever's painterly panoramas represent a continuation of the landscape tradition, as well as an evolution of the genre. Referencing a broad history of landscape painting, especially that of Romanticism, the Hudson River School and Luminism, they are imbued with a sense of the sublime. However, they also show a subversive side that deliberately acknowledges their contemporary contrivance and conceptual artifice. Keever's staged scenery is characterized by a psychology of timelessness. A combination of the real and the imaginary, they document places that somehow we know, but never were. The symbolic qualities he achieves result from his understanding of the dynamics of landscape, including the manipulation of its effects and the limits of spectacle based on our assumptions of what landscape means to us. Rather than presenting a factual reality, Keever fabricates an illusion to conjure the realms of our imagination.

In further scrutiny of this sunset image, I believe it was chosen for this exhibition because it captures not only what we see but what we feel which in this case is pure heat possibly eluding to an impending doom of global warming.