MARK KIMBER: Sun Pictures

MARK KIMBER  |  SUN PICTURES
Exhibition Text by Amy Patterson, 2007

Habits of sight are stubbornly persistent. We fall easily into a  bloody-mindedly literalism about the reality of place and its right  representation; caught up in the clear consensus expectation of what we know we  should see, soon enough we stop looking at all. Our everyday  reliance on shortcuts of perception is efficient, certainly, but it  can also leave us wandering, pedestrian and prosaic, lost to the latent potential of other worlds that fissure through the bland blank wash of the familiar. Few places are  as susceptible to the indifference of our regard as the urban-suburban borderland running between the insular sphere of home and  the public orbits of industry and amusement, a zone that we pass  through, blind and hurried, on our way to an elsewhere that already  has our attention.

Strange crucible, the ‘Diana’ camera; an unsophisticated plastic box with  no bells or whistles, a tumbling tunnel vision, and an intractable  disinclination to accommodate any requirements but its own; but here  in the dissolving warmth of the late afternoon light, even the most  unimposing of cameras may become an instrument of transmutation. With  this simple camera Mark Kimber has fashioned a more vivid landscape; one less ‘real’, if we believe that complacent convention is reality, but perhaps more  authentic for it.

The world of these Sun Picturesis at once entirely human and completely uninhabited; a loaded emptiness that could be either anticipation or aftermath. A lone observer moves amongst sharp-edged blocks and washes of poster-bright colours, the composition evoking the shapes and angles of comic books and movie sets. Clean, warm, and orderly, the Sun Pictures recreate elusive visions half-sighted out of the corner of the mind’s eye, apprehended in glimpses but never fully known.  Blue wall replicates blue sky, the vivid saturated blue of the sun-bright high-domed heat at the end of a summer’s day.These scenes belong not to any particular place, but perhaps summon up the tropes of an archetypal film, never made. A vague shadowy amalgam, loose in the culture at large, of pulp novels, flying saucer films, Saturday cartoons and urban legend.