Mason Kimber: A Caressing Gaze

Australian artist Mason Kimber works across painting, sculptural reliefs and site-specific installations to engage with the social dimension of architecture and its relation to memory. By remixing images and casts of architectural fragments into new compositions, Kimber envisions how physical facades and interiors can register histories within their skins. 

The nightclub was Kimber’s playground as a child. His bar-owning father—well-known in Perth's hospitality industry—often dreamed up pseudo-fantasy worlds by using theatrical stages and lighting to reconfigure rooms. He would take Kimber to the club during the day, when the venue was empty of patrons, and let him roam free around its makeshift thresholds. With a child’s eye line, Kimber’s gaze landed on objects and minutiae that became time-space portals. The buttons on the DJ mixer turned into spaceship controllers. The grooves in vinyl records appeared like coded inscriptions. Drinking glass fragments and the sticky surfaces of alcohol-soaked carpet offered clues to activities that happened the night before. 

As Kimber lingered through the venue’s backstage areas—storage rooms, offices, behind stages—he began to see these interiors as living labyrinths that continued to shapeshift in his mind. Using these personal recollections as a starting point, ‘A Caressing Gaze’ contemplates past worlds and their manifestation into the present by thinking through materialities. 

Tile Image: Mason Kimber, Strata (Dwelling) 2021. Acrylic, gypsum, sand, extruded polystyrene, wood. Image courtesy of the artist and Sophie Gannon Gallery, Melbourne.
Banner Image: Mason Kimber, Keystone 2024. Acrylic, foam coat, extruded polystyrene, wood. Image courtesy of the artist and Sophie Gannon Gallery, Melbourne.