This excerpt is taken from an article that featured in the Chautauquan Daily on July 7th.

Todi Steel and Popolopen, 2008 by Don Kimes

The silent presence of death stands inside the doors of the new Kellogg Hall, itself a transformation of more than a century of use, now used as galleries for the Visual Arts at Chautauqua Institution and renamed Fowler-Kellogg Art Center.

To celebrate the handsome new art center (3600 square feet over two floors and five galleries), Don Kimes has installed 24 pictures of ruinous destruction. They add a somber witness to change and reflect both the bitter and the sweet of any change.

The images report on all that is left of Kimes creative output during the first decades of his career as an artist – just about the same years that he has served the Institution, first as director of the School of Art and now as Artistic Director of the school and galleries and their programs.

A wall text installed in the Fowler-Kellogg gallery describes the situation in Kimes own words:“…on June 22, 2003 my home and studio outside Washington, DC were destroyed by a flood, causing the loss of 25 years worth of drawing and many paintings, five filing cabinets containing nearly everything I have ever written, most of the slides documenting my life and work as a painter, more than a thousand photographs including not only a record of my work…Nature took everything back.”

Kimes set out to create a photographic record of the destroyed material – the drawings, the paintings and the photographic records of his artistic images. Of particular interest were the oxidized photographs – a forensic well known to conservationists who work to preserve the world’s film heritage.

Films made before the late 1940s – particularly those of the silent era – were of a nitrate base, and highly flammable. Short of burning up, the film slowly, relentlessly oxidizes of its own according, in spite of archives’ best practices. It is a colorful process. As films decompose, the imagery they depict congeals into an array of hues massed to echo the original compositions — similar to the different, though effectively similar, oxidation experienced with Kimes’ photos.

Runny yellows, smudgy blues, burnt umbers, gravelly purples gather around a central point in the image, often framed by a remnant of sprocket holes. Sometimes a trace of another paper pressed into the water-glued disaster forms an overlying geometry,sometimes odd biomorphics emerge, some alien cellular structure, even replete with cilia.  Barbara Rose, the critic and friend of the artist, wrote of his work: ” The transformation of the material into the immaterial has always been the goal of ambitious painting.”

She was not being ironic. Kimes himself identifies in his gallery statement his interest in the results: ” metaphoric works based on time, nature, memory, perceived loss and re-birth.” Subjects which are inescapable.  Kimes’ images have died to one form to live as another— just as has the very building in which they are installed. No question: Kimes invention of over painting upon the photographic records of the destroyed photographs creates fascinating pictures. But they become even more interesting when the process of their destruction and recovery is acknowledges as a basis for metaphors of transformation, redemption, “perceived loss and rebirth.”

To read the entire article, click here and choose July 7.

Editor’s note: Our thanks to Don Kimes on his feedback to this article: “perceptively intelligent…one of the smartest pieces I’ve seen anyone write on my work.”

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