Kim Keever’s Miniature Landscapes Inside Fish Tanks

Artist Kim Keever creates beautiful landscape photographs by building elaborate dioramas in a 200 gallon tank, flooding the tank, and photographing the results. Keever uses colored lights and pigments to bring these dioramas of fictitious environments to life, which he must quickly capture with his large-format camera before the pigments disperse.

Kim Keever was born in New York City, where he continues to reside and work. After many years of making paintings, Keever decided to switch to photography after seeing the work of well known artist Cindy Sherman, who is renowned for her photographs of staged scenarios. Keever was also inspired by the work of 19th century American landscape painters from the Hudson River School. This influence is clearly evidence in his creations of miniature, yet grandiose, scenes of natural landscape models in fish tank in his apartment.

From the artist’s website:

Keever's painterly panoramas represent a continuation of the landscape tradition, as well as an evolution of the genre. Referencing a broad history of landscape painting, especially that of Romanticism, the Hudson River School and Luminism, they are imbued with a sense of the sublime. However, they also show a subversive side that deliberately acknowledges their contemporary contrivance and conceptual artifice. Keever's staged scenery is characterized by a psychology of timelessness. A combination of the real and the imaginary, they document places that somehow we know, but never were. The symbolic qualities he achieves result from his understanding of the dynamics of landscape, including the manipulation of its effects and the limits of spectacle based on our assumptions of what landscape means to us. Rather than presenting a factual reality, Keever fabricates an illusion to conjure the realms of our imagination.