Melbourne based artist Kiron Robinson works across neon, video, photography, text and sculpture to engage his ideas around doubt, faith and failure as constructive devices. Robinson explores perceptual process and the vulnerability of forms to project a world where everything becomes uncertain. Images might be scanned, layered, cropped, reconfigured and re-photographed—thus throwing the meaning of both the images and, by extension, the things they ‘document’ into question. Robinson’s video and sculptural forms similarly might purport to be one thing but, on closer examination, reveal themselves otherwise, as familiar objects are recast in unfamiliar materials or sited in unexpected ways.
Robinson's work is often underpinned by a sense of futility or doubt, best evidenced by well-known neon sign works ‘doubt’, ‘(m)any worries’ and ‘quiet desperation’ among others, which imbue a flippant or humorous aside with an underlying sense of foreboding.
What is photography? isn’t just a conceptual question, a matter of redefining the parameters of photography for a digital era. For Robinson it’s also a deeply personal question because embedded within it are a series of other perhaps more interesting concerns, not least of which, why photography? and what is a photographer?
Maura Edmond, Melbourne Art Guide, May 2015.