Kim Keever & Petroc Sesti

January 11—February 23, 2008

Carrie Secrist Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new photography by New York artist Kim Keever. In his new body of work, Keever photographs landscapes created in a new 200-gallon aquarium filled with water, and the scenes are now lusher with trees and fauna. It is as if Keever’s primordial past or post-apocalyptic world is beginning to come alive. The significantly larger sized pieces place the viewer evermore into his mesmerizing landscapes.

Kim Keever’s mysterious and painterly large-scale photographs represent a continuation of the landscape tradition, as well as an evolution of the genre. Referencing the Romanticism of the Hudson River School and 19th-century photography of the American West, 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. These images reflect none of the concerns with authenticity for which photography has historically been used; yet, they retain the inherent efficacy and rigor of their medium.

Keever’s photographs document places that never were. He creates his panoramic universes and controls their fictitious environments by constructing miniature topographies out of materials such as plaster and reflective Mylar in a 100-gallon aquarium, which is then filled with water. The desolate dream-like dioramas 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.