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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.
His recent "Eroded Man" series of Giacometti-like face formations and "Shell Man" series of submerged heads encrusted by the see and lost in time seem to represent how the eternal effects of nature have washed over worn expressions of the human condition.
Kim Keever lives in New York City and has exhibited extensively in galleries throughout the United States and abroad.
© Kinz + Tillou Fine Art
For New Art TV video interview. click here
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Keever was recently represented in the exhibition,"Otherworldly: Optical Delusions and Small Realities" at the Museum of Arts & Design, New York.
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He also recently had a solo exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Center of Virginia, Virginia Beach, through December 30.
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For Virginian-Pilot review click here
He is curretnly in the exhibition: "Deconstruction Nature", at the Hunterdon Art Musuem, Clinton NJ, October 2, 2011 - January 29, 2012