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Mark Kimber
Media release
This introductory exhibition of the work of Adelaide based artist Mark Kimber includes work from his celebrated Fictive Landscapes Series of 2004/05 and from his most recent body of work, Edgeland, 2008.
Kimbers’ Fictive Landscapes appropriate imagery from the European landscapes JMW Turner, John (Mad) Martin and Caspar David Friedrich – paintings that he encountered in a scrapbook as a child. Using digital imaging Kimber disrupts the idyllic mise-en-scene of these iconic landscapes with symbols from the present day and also incorporates his own photographic landscapes creating scenes that blend fact and fiction and which coexist in both past and present.
In his Edgeland series, Kimber continues his search to capture "situations where the play of light on form and landscape converge in time and space to create an elusive and ephemeral piece of theatre." Reminiscent of Jeffrey Smart’s spartan cityscapes and the work of American photographer Robert Adams, Kimber’s series of industrial cityscapes at dusk, encompass the feeling of an abandoned stage once again morphing senses of both the surreal and the familiar.
Mark Kimber was born in 1954 in Adelaide, South Australia. In 1981 he gained a BA in Fine Arts at the South Australian School of Art and in 2000 he completed an MA in Fine Arts at the Chelsea School of Art in London, UK. Since the early 1980s he has exhibited within Australia and internationally, and is currently the Studio Head of Photography and New Media at the South Australian School of Art, University of South Australia. His work is held in various public and private collections including the National Gallery of Australia, Art Gallery of South Australia, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Artbank, Parliament House Collection, Waverley City Art Gallery, Albury Regional Gallery, and the London Institute.
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Fictive Landscapes
Mark Kimber
When I was a little boy there was a picture on the wall of my bedroom. Now long since lost its exact details are somewhat hazy but its effect on me still lingers. There were mountains, snow capped and edged with cloud. An unassailable wilderness stretched across the foreground and high above the mountains soared a small plane. I have no idea whose work it was but the visceral sense of escape and wonder it filled me with is not something I have forgotten. Not everything else has been lost though.
My grandmother gave me a scrapbook gathered through years of travel, it held pictures from magazines, postcards and a diverse collection of family snapshots. As a child my first introduction to art was through this book. Paintings by Turner, Martin, Caspar David Freidrich and Bierstadt were dispersed amongst the pages, their beauty and power as inspirational to me today as they were then.
In producing these Fictive Landscapes, I have digitally brought together the landscapes that fascinated me as a child and combined with them my own photographic landscape images in an attempt to relocate that place of wonder. The gap between memory and experience, between then and now or between imagination and realisation, is, of course unbridgeable but that doesn’t stop us from trying.
2004
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