EXHIBITIONS / 11 MINUTES 20 SECONDS

13.08.2009 to 05.09.2009

Geoff Kleem's work has been grounded in his investigation of the relations between photography and the object. Kleem's objects, if they are bound by photography, nonetheless exist and operate separately from it, as if their desire were to break free of its reign. His work makes clear the instability of those relations. Photography has the object surrounded, one is tempted to say, before and after the fact -- which would situate the object, semantically, as the fact; but, it has to be admitted, sometimes the photograph is the fact. Not all the time, though: Kleem's work won't let us settle for anything so routine (or comfortable) as the substitution of representation for reality, even when he installs a 1:1 scale photograph. It is the near miss, the not quite, the close match, that marks Kleem's resistance to the simulacral. The fact that they are pre-, re- and even post-visualised by photographic means, suggests a constant worry about (and/or play with) the relations between means and objects. If the objects want to escape photography, there's also the sense that photography might not be quite up to the job of accounting for or containing them. The relations between photography and the object remain unstable and shifting.

Edited from Discomforts of Home, by Frazer Ward (Column 2, Artspace, 2008)

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