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WORK
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ART IN AMERICA, October 2005
By Edward Leffingwell
Kim Keever at Feigen Contemporary
A turbulent, inky wash of rain clouds streaks down from an impossibly opalescent blue sky toward a meandering river that leads into the middle distance of Kim Keever's chromogenic color photograph titled River Keeper (2003). The river seems to find its main source in a distant range of mountains under a sun just setting on an otherwise uninhabited landscape. The image an imagined landscape constructed and photographed by the artist recalls the invented worlds of the 16th-century Low Country painter Joachim Patinir, as well as the landscape traditions of China, the Hudson River School painters pursuing the sublime in art, and the great American landscape photographer Carleton Watkins.
About the same size as River Keeper (all images are approximately 50 by 68 inches), the more reductive, apocalyptic landscape of Acid Rain (2002) brings to mind a detail of Church's panoramic view of the volcano Cotopaxi. An upthrust mountain at center is bathed in an explosion of sulfurous yellow rising above a vaporous veil of green, with the pale-lavender light of something like moonrise off to the right. The craggy landscapes of Friedrich haunt the rocky strand that curves gently into the distant reaches of Less Than Strangers (2000), with what seems to be a massive boulder in the foreground, the atmosphere feathered with low-hanging clouds. Summer: Blue, Yellow and Gray (2004) is a storm-tossed landscape, trees blown sideways across its expanse in a scene remarkable for its contained violence and littered with wind-blown rubble.
July 3 and July 6 (both 2004) faced each other across the gallery. In July 3, the rocky coastline they both share is a near monochrome of pale blues that darken in the rocks and billowing clouds as though illuminated by moonlight. Small, bright instances of aerated light ornament the rocks. July 6, its near a mirror image, is bathed in a rosy, golden light. Both works feature shining, watery bands along the nearer reaches. This is, in fact, the effect of resin poured onto the floor of a large aquarium Keever uses to create, alter and light these elaborate, ephemeral studio set-ups. The trees are made up of branches and bonsai. The rocks are crafted. What appear to be atmospheric distur-bances and fields of color are made possible by a series of hoses that introduce air and pigment into the tank. Keever takes the role of sole architect and recording witness to the first days of creation, or perhaps the last.
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