The following is a brief preview - the full content of this page is available to premium users only.
Click here to subscribe...
Kim Demuth's work has always had an eerie quality about it. Over the last eighteen months his installations have dealt with notions of presence and absence-an examination of what, if anything, is 'left behind' after someone or something. Like a sixth sense, these works leave the viewer with an intuitive feeling of an absent identity, recently departed.
A piece from 1999 consisted of a wooden chair in a darkened room. Above the chair hung a single light globe, which illuminated a small circumference around it. In this ellipse of light, a silhouette of a person sitting on the chair was apparent. lt was as if the person had only just left and their shadow had not had time to respond. Many animals rely on their sense of smell more than their sense of sight. As scent can linger longer than vision, their perception of presence and absence is vastly different to that of humans.1 As we rely predominantly on sight, Demuth has given us a visual clue to these once present beings.
After experiencing these works I found myself wondering what evidence I leave behind, what trace of my presence exists after I have departed. Demuth's new work presents us with tangible evidence. Returning to a smaller scale and to his fetishistic obsession with boxes, Demuth displays specimens that give proof to the existence of what is no longer there. There is a museum artefact quality to these works, which gives them a sense of 'authenticity' and 'validity'. The boxes contain objects juxtaposed in the same kind of surrealistic fashion as was explored by Joseph Cornell, but with a much more gruesome twist. The kind of grievous bodily harm Demuth is