© Kim Keever
I have to say that I am completely stunned by the work of Kim Keever. I am stunned in part because it is amazingly beautiful and brilliantly conceived.
The genius for me is in the concept of using a fish tank as a staging platform. The idea of a self-sustaining environment such as a fish tank mimics the earth in a profound way. A concoction of sculpture, painting and photographic prowess combined with the fluid dynamics of a fish tank produces a god like play on the environmental evolution of the planet. It evokes a sense of the equilibrium required to maintain what we accept as nature. To me, it is a perfectly logical environment in which to paint the real world. It is the kind of art that makes me want to say I wish I had thought of it.
Kim creates his dioramas within the realm of a 200-gallon tank filled with water and photographs the final results with a camera. The fabricated murkiness, globs of colored dye and blobs of milky clouds, miniature plastic trees, mylar rivers and plaster landforms, combined with dramatic use of lighting and color reproduction, generate worlds, which resemble the landscapes of our dreams.
The resulting images have the sublime qualities of the paintings created by the Hudson River Artists, whose works captured the majestic light and the heavenly impressions of an awe inspiring natural world. Yet the playful nature of these fish tank landscapes suggests a very real vulnerability and the possible impermanence of what we moderns conceive as nature.
In this work, I see amazingly beautiful worlds that come and go, where humanity only matters if enough of us care enough about life.
From his website:
“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.”
Here are a few YouTube videos about his work.
Please have a look at some of my other posts here.
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