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The underlying tone from which Kim Pieters' online survey exhibition of paintings, drawings, photographs and moving-image soundscapes emerges can be summarised with these two words: 'something possible'. These words not only characterise the visual process of Pieters' work but also her investigation into the inherent potential of any situation, which runs as a conceptual thread throughout her work. The artworks, produced in the artists' inner-harbor studio in Dunedin, are informed by a deep engagement with a strand of European philosophy that deals with the shape of life, from Spinoza through Deleuze, as by her own living. To experience her work is to wonder about reality. Slowly this unconscious event gives rise to a self- conscious interrogation of the mysteriosity and suggestive beauty we are surrounded by. Then an aporia arises, what is known comes to a dead end, a new road to understanding must be considered.
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Deleuze especially investigates a transcendental empiricism, which makes its appearance as an experience without either consciousness or subject; this paradox particularly intrigues me - Kim Pieters
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Wandering lines, arbitrary shapes, poetic smudges and scratches dance between harmony and disorder, totally surrendering to the occasion. Big and small graphite doodles, which come across as improvised abstract gestures reminiscent of Twombly’s energy, subtly create an all consuming visual field. Intense mental activity is boiled down to light touches lending the paintings and drawings an ethereal, lyrical and deeply evocative quality. (Arthur Buerms)
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Kim Pieters' Studio
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There is always an almost invisible line of text—often a quote or a poetic reference—along the bottom of each work, which serves as title but also as a mantra, to hold in the mind while one learns to look…. possibilities, distant memories, and feelings emerge but never fix….The lines, the stains are so delicate, but so very deliberate; there is human frailty and decisive ambiguity; the colour irradiates. Is there ‘existential poise’? If so, then here it is (Carl A Maers)
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Like a composer, Pieters orchestrates a previously undefined set of generative criteria that allows choices to act and where not, how far to go and when to stop, in such a way as the cumulative engagement of seeming chaos defines an original, hybrid kind of order, which in turn illuminates a complex sense of human experience. Ranging from cool blues to grey hues, from palest of pinks, to lush greens and blood orange, Pieters’ idioynscratic use of colors both complement and contrast with the formal language, penetrating the viewer’s senses. The color manages to dematerializes the support structure into a series of shimmeringly optical veils that open and expand the picture plane, just like the exponents of the 50’s abstract expressionistic and colourfield wave (Helen Frankenthaler and Louis Morris).
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Photographs and moving-image
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The Golden Fields is a different kind of painting (...) and also painterly in the composition of the image field, which at all times fills the frame very consciously. There is a consistent tension between the reading of what is seen on the screen as an identifiable landscape and as an abstract image in which the markers are purely formal.
The movement in the work is inseparable from the sound, which is produced by UK-based drone musician Peter Wright….There will be no sudden movements here, everything is stripped back to its minimal form and the sound will see the light out… The gold verticals are the strings of a harp; the volume of the sound relates to the weight of the furrowed earth which holds down the base of the image; the movement is pulling the darkness along with it like an ending deferred, so that there is time for waking slowly, so that there is time for everything.
- Text by Abby Cunnane - There is Time for Waking Slowly - Kim Pieters' The Golden Fields (16 January 2014 - commissioned by Circuit)
Kim Pieters - The Golden Fields (2009) - 54min 47 sec
Camera & Editing: Kim Pieters
Audio: Peter Wright from disc 2 of 'The Snow Blind' double CD (2009) -
Excerpt from "A holding apart of air" - Gregory Kan
A walk across two or more intersections, through wet leaves, to a place that was neither church nor school. She lowered the half- blackened, half-clear lamp on a table in the centre of the room, and pointed. I remember having been in that same place as a child, and that the snow blinded me while the other children would call out for me to catch up with them. That the snow made a sound she couldn’t spell. That the way she was affected would transcend what she feared.
Something Possible : A survey exhibition by Kim Pieters
Past viewing_room
