Kim Keever’s Quasi-Temporary Aquascapes & Joanna Newsom’s Long View
Kim Keever, whose meticulously staged diorama photographs capture scored landscapes that exist as documentation, provided cover art for Joanna Newsom’s 2015 album Divers. In a New York Times interview, she talks about Keever’s work, and the interviewer interpolates notes on the photo artist’s practice:
“I like the fact that it’s not clear whether they represent a period of time before humans, or a period of time after humans, the post-apocalyptic thing, or whether they represent just a part of the world where there are no humans, or whether they represent an iteration of Earth within the multiverse where humans never evolved to exist,” Ms. Newsom said. “And I like that the landscapes are viewed from a great distance in most cases, which is an image that comes up for me a lot in these songs, viewing things from above, speeding over landscapes.”
Actually, Mr. Keever’s photographs document vanishingly brief events. He builds the miniature landscape and immerses it in a 200-gallon aquarium that is filled with water and dramatically lit. From a platform above the aquarium he pushes dyes into the water as the camera catches the swirling, evanescent shapes and colors. There are only a few moments before the water becomes a muddled brown.
“His work is about time in a lot of ways,” Ms. Newsom observed. “He’s depicting these concrete landscapes, scenes we associate with permanence. They’re rock-solid and massive and much bigger than us. But they’re also these works that start disintegrating instantly — they’re so time-sensitive and time-dependent.”
And here’s a video for a song from Newsom’s 2015 album, which embeds a classical take on Manhattan development (via references to Shelley’s blasted landscape poem “Ozymandias”). Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson.
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