Three Proposals

A football bladder, a sheet of polythene, a lump of styrofoam, cardboard packing, and an upturned stool: these are materials variously employed by Ian Kiaer in his installations. Moreover these might be thought of as the visible signs of a world we can physically grasp, but which remains essentially elusive.

Kiaer describes the importance of the fragment as a means of referencing something beyond the actual, in short, the thing or idea that remains absent. His endeavour to conjure up an elsewhere through paintings by Pieter Bruegel or architectonic models of BrunoTaut or Frederick Kiesler cannot, or indeed, must not, succeed; instead, his work shows clearly that these delicately displayed fragments or shreds cannot replace- or even stand in for- the whole. The resulting aura of melancholia stems from the explicit failure to complete the project, to bring a place or earlier image to life in its original state.