Mark Kimber & Polixeni Papapetrou

Overview

The two shows on now at Stills Gallery are by established, mature photographers creating their own dreamworlds and representing fantasy and identity in ways that provoke enthusiasm as childlike as their mysterious subjects and a Lacanian freak-out.

Mark Kimber's All That Glisters series is framed in smoothly finished black and mounted deep under immaculate glass. The 40x40 prints themselves are of — deep breath — seagoing outer-space rock-star Victoriana collectibles in diorama. They're shiny, with little glitter-encrusted gold men in them and glossy fires and glassy waters in the tableaux, light reflecting off the hermetically encapsulated domes. It's like he's made snow globes of images from exploits imagined for a grown-up future then photographed them in a grown-up way, making fun of the images but preserving them as complete and inviolable.

Inscrutable rather than impenetrable, the creature-masked children of Between Worlds almost seem to be superimposed on Polixeni Papapetrou's crisply coloured landscapes. Captured in motion, engrossed in an adventure, the pictures' ornately vintage-costumed inhabitants don't evade or deflect scrutiny but seem unaware of it. The larger-proportioned animal heads situate them in a 105x105 fairytale and subvert the usually authoritative gaze of the observer. Stuck in the Symbolic order, the viewer is confronted with a staging of Imaginary they may conceive of but cannot properly enter. It's beautiful, but a bit like not being invited to play.