Australian artist Mason Kimber uses painting, sculptural reliefs, and installation to engage with the social dimension of architecture, particularly its relationship to memory. By reworking images and casts of architectural fragments into new assemblages, Kimber explores how physical facades and interiors can register histories within their skins.
‘A Caressing Gaze’ brings together a collection of recent works, including new textural paintings that extend into wall relief and a site-specific installation that gleans impressions from the surfaces of the built environment. Using iterative processes of moulding, casting, and framing, Kimber looks at the painted surface not simply as a space to depict an image, but as a dynamic site of transformation, activating relations to place, architecture, histories, and memory.
“Growing up in Perth, my playground was often an empty nightclub. With a club-owning father who often spent his daytime dreaming up new architectural adjustments, I was left free to roam by myself. My attention landed on small minutiae that became portals into another time: I pretended the buttons on a DJ mixer were a spaceship controller; the grooves in vinyl records appeared like memory tablets, and the glass fragments and sticky surfaces of alcohol-soaked concrete offered clues to the events that had happened the night before. I was led through secret passages into back rooms and stages framed with semi-permanent metal structures. That’s when I started to think about these buildings as living labyrinths and assemblages of textural detail that continue to shift in the mind.” — Mason Kimber, 2024
Installation images by Jacquie Manning, courtesy of UNSW Galleries.
Artwork:
Skyfade, 2025
Acrylic, paper pulp, hessian, composite render, extruded
polystyrene, wood
92 x 80 x 7 cm
