Screen Memory

Since its invention, cinema has been linked to an understanding of how memory functions. Kimber’s paintings explore this link in relation to his own experience.

Freud coined the term ‘screen memory’ to describe the way our earliest memories are created rather than recalled, implicated as they are with later memories, fantasies and desires. And as the recollection of a memory is a creative process, so too is the recollection of an image. In a world in which “reality is always already an image”, the dynamics of memory increasingly find their visualisation through image-based media like film. Contributing to the recurring déjà-vu of contemporary experience, cinema’s simulacral impetus is enhancing our shared collective visual memory. Our inner dialogue with memory works in a similar way to filmic techniques of montage, flash-backs and fade-outs, and filtered images from films become extended memory referents, embellishing the fragmented factualities of personal experience with the artificial and the imagined.

Painting also incorporates cinematic devices like layering, montage and dissolve. However, the subjective nature of paint always exceeds its representational inferences. Taking his cue from the interior architecture of film-stills, Kimber emphasises mood over verisimilitude by employing painterly processes unique to the materiality of paint itself. The result is a sophisticated perceptual ‘screen’ in which elusive images, imprecise and undefined, hover on the threshold of recognisability in ambiguous visual spaces. Like memory, indiscernability is the focus of these images, as they fade and dissolve into each other like scenes in a film.

ISBN: 978-1-921661-37-2