Digital Collage
2013 First Edition
220 pages
22″ x 22″
signed by the author.
This book is only available from Kinnebrew Studios
$125.00 Click to purchase
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Images in this book are available as a signed and numbered limited edition prints, limited to 24 prints. The prints are archival quality giclees using archival inks and paper.
Image size is 12” x 12” on 17” x 17” paper. Signature, image title and edition number at the bottom.
If you wish to know the current price and availability use the identifier shown with the image on each page.
We offer matte and framing options upon request.
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The late New York Times art critic William Zimmer wrote that Joseph Kinnebrew is, “The 800 pound gorilla in the room, impossible to ignore.”
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Book Description:
This is a book of digital collages created between the years 1995 and 2010. Exhibited in Europe and later the United States and they have received considerable attention from critics and collectors.
In addition to the images there are notes made by Kinnebrew while he was a student at Syracuse University in the early sixties. They are unedited and taken at random from his sketchbooks. Kinnebrew is a surrealist he has said down to his toes, uncommonly well read and deeply interested in semiology. Symbols and metaphor are essential elements in these images. When looking more closely at these works viewers are often surprised since unrelated details are sometimes easily overlooked, and their meanings intentionally obscured.
Digital collage is a laborious process requiring infinite patience. Although digital creations are common today when Kinnebrew began using the computer in the early nineties the art world was skeptical. AI creations prompt similar debates today. Far more than visual entertainment, surrealism is thought by some to be the most intellectual of artistic expressions.
Language of the sub-conscious.
10.
Garden Meditation.
There is something profound about being in the garden. There is dirt there, weeds and intended plants. There is a futile struggle going on for an order that is not natural. It is a place of encouraged beauty, sensual fragrance and carefully tended form. It is a place of chemicals, amputees and manipulation.
When it rains, the garden renews itself. It seizes the opportunity that comes when people aren’t tramping around and making noise. But the sun does shine and the noise picks up, and I think the flowers show us a pretended smile, as if they were good little boys and girls and I was the teacher.
I don’t own my garden.
There is a special beauty in the early morning. The dewdrops are still big and in their reflection, hold a tiny giant image of all the world around them, in one little drop, on one little petal. These whole images are everywhere and many on the same petal or flower. I wonder how one plant with its small droplets can hold so much vision. I wonder that about some people too.
The rounded water visions disappear when the sun insists on burning brighter with light and heat. The dewdrops are flung away, into the dirt, when our dog or people suddenly brush them aside. I could hope that by falling to the ground the water might moisten the dirt and be good for the plants. But, in the dry rush of the sun and its relentless push toward its death in the night, the moisture is lost before it ever gets a chance to benefit the plant. It is lost into the evaporating air.
In the simplicity of the garden, mysteries are not puzzles to be solved, but fantasies to be dreamed in time that does not exist. It’s sometimes best not to make things complicated. The self-hypnosis of pleasure overcomes my senses if I hesitate long enough and let the rest of the world recede like the outgoing tide that inevitably comes flooding back in again.
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Text selections :
1.
I have gone through life standing on my toes. Always reaching. Always stretching may be okay for practitioners of yoga but for most of us, in time, it becomes a bit wearisome. This is a thing of never having enough hours in the day. Never getting to the end of one’s “to do” list. Never getting it just right, but insisting on doing it one more time.
Going through life on your toes causes funny wear patterns. Your heels don’t wear like most people’s. Instead, it is the front of your footwear and feet that take all the weight and friction. The idea is that by standing on your tiptoes, you are higher than your normal self, thus able to see more than you were genetically intended to.
Wearing high heels would be easier and, in fact, adding to that, wearing some of those amazing platform shoes would be even better. But most people regard the few who wear these incredible shoes as odd or at the very least, individuals in pursuit of an unmentionable agenda.
Standing on your toes may be hard but, I think of the many fences I have looked over. I think of those who built them just above my eye level thinking that this would keep me resignedly in my own back yard. I think about calf muscles that ached from standing stretched out for too long because I just couldn’t get enough of the view. Out there beyond the blinding fence there have been parades and parties, funeral couteges and terrible fights. Out there the seasons changed more quickly, and the sky was red. Out there people flew through the air while reclining on the faces of elaborate timepieces.
Standing on my toes I saw Alice falling through the looking glass and then come out again. She looked around and beckoned to me as she went back in. “Now this is my kind of place,” I said. “Of course,” she said.
8.
I will outlast the sun. I will outlast all the suns and all the stars. O will outlast all the nights and all the days of earth. My infinite spirit is in infinite particles, blown through infinite space with a presence mortal men can never know. I will race through time into the finiteness of infinity where there is no measure.
Being is an earthling’s concern. It is important to us who by living know, but not when we will die in human terms. Human beings we define as special because we have decided they are in a state of intelligent conscious being.
We are deluded by a preposterous and outrageous presumption. Human life, we believe, is unique in the cosmos. Although we acknowledge the possible existence of others and perhaps their greater or lesser intelligence, it is our beginning notion, of so called intelligent life, that initiates this thought and brings it forward to a state of reality as we define it.
Consider this:
Human life is a cosmic accident – a slippage that is corrected by death.
Death is a cosmic fix – a return to normal.
In the cosmos, there is no life or death. In order to set things back to the cosmic state of status quo, death, to end the accident of life, is a necessary correction. Life is disorder, a disunity, and an incomplete idea that cannot complete itself. It bonds with nothing and therefore cannot make something greater than the sum of its parts. Life can only destroy or be destroyed.
Our vain search for consilience while in this state of error (life) is futile. This futility is expressed in man’s self-aggrandizing performance and pursuit of perception and perfection.
Death is a return to normality. It is infinite finiteness, sum zero, and is perfection in the cosmos. Man’s positional error is aggravated by his need for an explanation of, or belief in, “the order of things” that in their actual state, (a relative term), simply do not function within the defined term of “the order of things”.
Then what to do? There must be a channel of awareness or compatibility with such concepts of non-human, non-ordered nature. If “human” being doesn’t get us there, then is there any point in trying? Maybe hedonism isn’t so bad after all because that’s all we really have to choose from at the end of the day.
But I think not.
I believe there is a potential to flow with this, “life as accident, death as correction”, awareness. I suspect that the key is in movement. Cerebral time traveling. It is our ability to creatively imagine or, what a friend of mine calls, spiritual awareness.
So when it’s time to unpack your life and pack your particles to again sail on the cosmic winds all will be good again. No more, “Angels we have heard on high.” Instead, it’s, “The answer my friend is blowin’ the wind”.