Mark Kimber: Mythic landscapes

Posted: 14 Jan 2010  |  By: Stephanie Radok

Sometimes the sky can be mythic. It is happening a lot lately in Adelaide where one day the weather is almost tropical with sublime clouds in whites and greys and strange moody pinks twisting and flowing across the sky, and the next day it is cold, a real winter's day, and the morning is full of mist that clears later to towers of scalloped white clouds with grey underbellies.

Mark Kimber has spent most of his life under the large Adelaide sky. His photography has frequently focused on the suburban, the industrial, the borders or the 'edgelands' of Adelaide with cloudless blue-glowing or night-darkened skies familiar as both backdrops and essential contributors to the sense of unreality achieved in his images. Kimber's work draws on his admiration of the work of Edward Hopper and Jeffrey Smart and their creation of precise urban spaces that speak of human loneliness. Though his photographs are frequently of car parks, industrial sites, commercial buildings and vacant uninhabited spaces, they suggest human presence. That implied presence is often a masculine one and seems vulnerable or shaky even as it threatens or promises violence.

Kimber has also made several series of photographs of male dolls that he paints and arranges to seem almost human. These photographs hint at the smoke and mirrors nature of masculinity.

One of Kimber's creative touchstones was an epiphany that he had in swampy country near Woodville where he grew up. He was out riding his bike and lost track of time and suddenly, though the sky was still alight with the day, a full moon rose over the wasteland. It was one of those manifest moments, between day and night; the poet's hour, when the light achieves a certain unreal luminosity and it seems as if time has stopped still. This is the moment found in many of Kimber's suburban or industrial photographs. It is the moment he seeks to recreate and recapitulate, his 'punctum'. In Roland Barthes' 1980 study Camera Lucida, the French philosopher developed two concepts for studying photographs. The studium denotes the cultural, linguistic and political interpretation of a photograph, while the punctum refers to the personally touching detail which establishes a direct 'piercing' relationship with what is depicted within it.

Kimber's six Fictive Landscapes with their grand spaces and vast skies are also a return to memories of his childhood in the 1950s and 60s - in particular to an image that hung opposite his bed which he looked at every night until he was about twelve years old. He does not recall its title or the name of its creator but has tried in Fictive Landscapes to recreate the feeling that it gave rise to, in his words "a visceral sense of escape and wonder", an introduction to a wider and more stimulating world than the one in which he found himself - that of an unhappy and unadventurous family. Yet he was blessed with travelling grandparents and access to the scrapbook album that held the postcards of foreign places and artworks in galleries overseas bought by his grandmother. It was the site of his first experience of art and another source, a place of reclamation for the Fictive Landscapes which thus contain in a way an invented or falsified nostalgia for something that never happened. The word nostalgia is derived from the Greek language and consists of the words néstos, 'returning home' and álgos 'pain' or 'ache'. In conversation, Kimber reiterates that his home was not a happy place to be (and he hated school and was poor at sport) so there are mingled memories of both pain and wonder buried in these images.

Each Fictive Landscape is digitally stitched together by the artist using Photoshop from scanned images of large and small copies of up to ten different paintings. The range in size of the source imagery contributes to its unreality as blurring and precision, scale and detail conflict or are made to mesh. Like memory, they come in and out of focus and may make us feel dizzy looking for the middle distance. Kimber often used photomontage in pre-digital times and admires the work of famous American photomontagist Jerry N Uelsmann, who used - and still uses - up to ten enlargers in the darkroom to create his complex analogue photomontages.

The artists that Kimber samples range from JMW Turner to Albert Bierstadt, Caspar David Friedrich to John Martin - all painters of the sublime in landscape - bordering on the kitsch in the case of Bierstadt with his bombastic images of the American West and Martin with his great turbulent skies and overblown Biblical themes. In fact, all of these painters did what John Ruskin, writing about Turner's tendency to change reality to fit his purposes, called 'Turnerian topography'. Kimber's Turnerian topography sometimes uses the work of just one artist, sometimes several. Kimber also includes fragments of his own photographic landscapes taken in the country around Adelaide, thus combining painting and photography, familiarity and strangeness as well as the location of the sublime in his own 'backyard'.

The scale of the works, two metres across and seventy centimetres high, imparts a Wagnernian stage-set quality in which the viewer is thrown into apocalyptic spaces of vastness and terribilità. They are also, in their falseness and staginess, reminiscent of Tony Clark's Sections from Clark's Myriorama in which 'views' are painted from a game invented in 1824 by John Clark (no relation) where there are sixteen painted cards, each of which could be joined to any of the others to form a continuous view of endless variations of scenery - supposedly 27,922,789,880,000 of them.

Yet each of Kimber's Fictive Landscapes except for one, Cascade, is made contemporary - or at least World War I - by the inclusion of an aeroplane somewhere in the sky shedding a vapour trail and betokening a human presence in the face of an impossible world. It is there because the image on the wall in Kimber's childhood bedroom had an aeroplane in it and thus is likely to have been from A Boy's Own Annual or something like that. This is another angle of the work, a whiff of the fifties, a Maxfield Parrish iceberg, a certain macho destiny and modernist style as typified in the recent TV program focused on the fifties Madmen. It doesn't take much to picture the young Kimber imagining himself inside the plane escaping to unreal artificial places that buckle and twist reality.

Image: Mark Kimber, Vapour Trail, 2004, giclee print, 80 x 200cm.