Mason Kimber: A Caressing Gaze

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 compositions, Kimber explores how physical facades and interiors can register histories within their skins.

‘A Caressing Gaze’ presents a collection of works, including preparatory drawings and new textural paintings that extend into wall relief and a site-specific installation that gleans impressions from the surfaces of the built environment.

Using childhood recollections of his father’s nightclub as a starting point, Kimber looks at the painted surface not simply as the space to depict an image but as a dynamic site of transformation, activating relations to place, architecture, histories and memory. 

Mason Kimber writes: “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, glass fragments and the sticky surfaces of alcohol-soaked concrete offered clues to the events that 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.”

Image: Mason Kimber, _Keystone _2024. Image courtesy of the artist and Sophie Gannon Gallery, Melbourne