Mark Kimber
“The photographs of Suburban Nights explore the landscapes of the suburban night. They investigate the architecture of suburbia as theatre, lit by flash, long exposures and torchlight, the images seek to evoke a sense of displacement. By visiting at night, the areas in which I grew up, I have tried to show these homes as being unfixed in time, floating outside of the everyday, almost dream-like in their exaggerated colours and freed from the moment by long (30 min) exposures. These are stages, lit in readiness for the absent players who built them.” (Mark Kimber 2003)
“When I was a little boy there was a picture on the wall of my bedroom. Now long since lost, its exact details are somewhat hazy but its effect on me still lingers…I have no idea whose work it was but the visceral sense of escape and wonder it filled me with is not something I have forgotten…In producing these Fictive Landscapes, I have digitally brought together the landscapes that fascinated me as a child and combined them with my own images in an attempt to relocate that place of wonder. The gap between memory and experience, between then and now or between imagination and realisation is, of course, unbridgeable but that doesn’t stop us from trying.” (Mark Kimber 2004)
By The Dawn’s Early Light shifts focus from the empty stage that awaits occupation to the performer. Working with the detail and rich colour unique to the 20 × 24 Polaroid camera, By The Dawn’s Early Light re-stages male ‘action hero’ dolls in postures familiar from American culture to explore not only the cultural investment in worshipping the stars of war and sport but our own investment in the desire to reanimate figures that might inhabit the shifting interstices of Kimber’s fictive landscapes.
