"I would say that my focus has become the creation of random beauty with a guiding hand." - Kim Keever
Kim Keever's creates spontaneous and expressive large-scale abstract photographs by pouring pigments into a 200 gallon tank of water, producing billowing, explosive billows of color that he quickly captures with a large-format camera.
He is also well-known for his large-scale landscape photographs, made by precisely creating miniature topographies in an empty tank, then filled with water. These dioramas of fictional environments are brought to life by using colored light filters and pigment dispersal - producing ephemeral atmospheres that he quickly captures with a large-format camera.
Keever's panoramas are a continuation of landscape tradition, evolving the genre. He references an expansive history of landscape painting, especially Romanticism and that of the Hudson River School, expressing a sense of the sublime. However, they also have a subversive side that acknowledges their contemporary and conceptual themes.
Keever's staged scenery involves a psychology of time and timelessness. Combining the real and the imaginary, they capture places that somehow we know, but never have seen. The symbolic aspects result from his understanding of the dynamics of landscape, along with the manipulation of its effects and the limits of spectacle based on our assumptions of what landscape means to us. Rather than presenting a factual reality, Keever creates an illusion that brings us into the realm of our imagination.
"I’d like to think of myself as someone who combines the history of art with the art of our times. That may seem like an obvious path, but for some artists I’m not so sure." - Kim Keever
Kim Keever studied Engineering at Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA and worked for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) for a brief time. Keever became a full-time artist in the mid 70s. His background in science and engineering has aided him with many constructions concerning his work and the general thought process that is required of a scientist. Keever's landscapes are often associated, though not intentionally, with the Hudson River School and the German Romantic painters.
Kim Keever lives and works in New York City. His work is in numerous collections, including: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virgina; Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, Virginia; Nassau County Museum of Fine Art, Roslyn, New York; Patterson Museum, Patterson, New Jersey; George Washington University Gallery, Washington DC; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri and Elgin Community College, Elgin, Illinois.