Mark Kimber

All That Glisters

28 July - 14 August 2010

All That Glisters

The moments contained and frozen by the hermetically sealed mini dioramas of Mark Kimber's All That Glisters hover on the edge of recognisability; they feel familiar, but not specifically or identifiably so. This may be because the story they tell is allusive, not narrative; it is felt before it is known. Suffused with melancholy, they carry the trace of regret for lost things - lost hopes, lost ideals, lost aspirations - sparkling brittle things at the intersection of masculinity and modern mythos that never could survive the oxidising bite of reality, although it once seemed that they could. It's a story that Mark Kimber is well placed to tell, as he is no stranger to teasing out the nuances and limbic-subjective tones of lost worlds of the collective imagination and of the tropes and forms of contemporary masculine enculturation.

The atomic age took the phantasies and the anxieties of an uncertain era and offered up the projected future of a man, of men, as invulnerable, possessed of mastery and an untroubled certainty. A decidedly masculine vision for a decidedly masculine age. It spun the phantasy, and promised that from this base stuff of egotism abd worldly vanity the illuminating energies of science and industry and commerce would work their transformative magic and render up gold; not just the gilt and shine of decorative surface, but the real thing, solid and pure all the way through. Here was the hope that that he/we could at last be clean and safe and powerful, astride a solid and knowable world, pushing back the darkness lying within and without, and remaking the messy corrupible stuff of life into something durable and orderly. We may have abandoned as naive the belief that the gold can go all the way through- we know better now, or think we do, fresh-minted post-moderns that we are - but we still love the shine.

This is, perhaps, the heroic failure of our dying age, of which all of the otehr disillusionments and defeats are merely echos - this hopeless, impossible belief that the world could be remade in a way that would make it better and not just different, and that we were the ones to do it.

Amy Patterson

2010

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