The following is a brief preview - the full content of this page is available to premium users only.
Click here to subscribe...
For some years now Geoff Kleem has been making images and objects that always catch us in our own acts of looking. They do so without resorting to an earnest theoretical sloganeering, yet they appear to embody some wry form of knowing.
Kleem's objects often manifest a form of collusion between contemporary industrial design and minimalist opacity, both revelling in and gently mocking aesthetics of consumerist functionality. And it is in this conundrum that they catch us pondering just what values underpin our constructed world. This and the fact that, however finely realised, these objects always seem provisional on a number of counts. The mechanics of their design and structure are always apparent and so subject to imagined dismantlement - generic kit-sets of sorts rather than hermetic, autonomous objects. They have at times been wrapped in plastic, as if to deny their very functionality, or to suggest impending removal, whilst their frequent placement on wheels (or more recently on sled-runners) has added to this sense of spatial contingency - as if their presence in the gallery space is as transient as our own. In Kleem's work the much vaunted site specificity of post-minimalist sculpture is treated as a fundamentally rhetorical device – one adaptive mode of signification amongst many.
Kleem's photographs effectively double these acts of emphatic yet consistently contingent spatial reference. Attention is drawn, again consistently, to the material presence of the work. Images are frequently bolstered, for example, by some architecture of ostensible presentation that is, of course, a fundamental element of the work itself. (Or they are, in fact, forensic images of 'architectural' spaces - from white blasted warehouse walls to rubbish dumps - transformed in the... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline