In this fascinating series, artist Kim Keever creates large-scale photographs that look like landscape paintings. The effect is created by constructing miniature topographies in a 200-gallon tank. Keever then fills the tank with water. Using colored lights and the dispersal of various pigments, Keever produces these temporary and ephemeral landscapes that he then quickly captures with his large-format camera.

Keever’s work is currently on display at the David B Smith Gallery in Denver, Colorado. The gallery adds:

“Keever’s painterly panoramas represent a continuation of the landscape tradition, as well as an evolution of the genre. Referencing a broad history of landscape painting, especially that of Romanticism, the Hudson River School and Luminism, they are imbued with a sense of the sublime. However, they also show a subversive side that deliberately acknowledges their contemporary contrivance and conceptual artifice.
 
Keever’s staged scenery is characterized by a psychology of timelessness. A combination of the real and the imaginary, they document places that somehow we know, but never were. The symbolic qualities he achieves result from his understanding of the dynamics of landscape, including 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 fabricates an illusion to conjure the realms of our imagination.
 
Kim Keever lives in New York City and has exhibited extensively in museums and galleries throughout the United States and abroad. His work is currently on exhibit at the Hunterdon Art Museum in Clinton, New Jersey in the exhibition Deconstructing Nature and was most recently featured in Otherworldly at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York. Public collections include the Metropolitan Museum, New York, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, Virginia, the Nassau County Museum of Fine Art, Roslyn, New York, the Hirschhorn Museum in Washington D.C. and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond.”