From the Focus Gallery Exhibition
The Addendums
All Focus Gallery exhibitions contain four elements:
Exhibition Work, Curator Comments, Work Description and Artist Statement.
The Exhibition Work
Joseph Kinnebrew
ARTIFACTS
May – June
The Curators Comments
Art of the surreal has long used found objects for contrast and editorial opinion. Perhaps the comment aspect is best understood in the seminal work of Marcel Duchamp’s sculpture of the bicycle wheel mounted atop a stool (1913). It has been written that it was, “A protest against the excessive importance attached to works of art.”
These small sculptures from Kinnebrew are a contrast with his much larger, often monumentally scale welded steel and cast bronze sculptures completed earlier in his career. Kinnebrew himself is in many respects a contrast and these small works reflect his interest in the micro elements and aspects of our lives. He is known to spend hours with his microscope examining curious details missed by others.
A person of curiosity, this artist is also a collector of the serendipitous that here he offers under glass as artifacts. They are suggestions of time past with objects preserved and refreshed, new accompaniments of themes and stimulants for imagination. These are not frivolous trappings but rather flights of imagination, fancy, and provocation. Artists do these things, they poke and prod us with memories and stimulants to remind and carry us forward.
The Work Description
About Artifacts
The artist: Joseph Kinnebrew
The process: found objects, assemblages, glass
Small sculptures assembled from found objects. Presentation is objects under clear glass domes ranging in size from six to fourteen inches tall on six-inch wood bases.
Kinnebrew is well known as an innovator, constantly exploring new methods and media. Each Zeteum is carefully inspected by him for artistic content and craftsmanship.
William Zimmer, Senior Art Critic of the New York Times has written, “His work is impossible to ignore.”
The ARTIST STATEMENT
In my lifetime there have been monumental changes, successes, tragedies, defeats, and victories. As an artist I look to a larger picture, that is often what “we” do.
In this time of climate change, debate and pandemic people forget precedents, in each period, there are differences, changes of context. We live in this time of the Anthropocene, an era of biology. Following “the time” of physics and before that one alleged to have been “enlightenment.”
Biology is very much about process and that is what these mono-prints embody. There are events here educed by my hand and circumstance, they are frozen like specimens on a glass slide under the microscope. Specimens for examination and considerations of how and what for. Strange beauty of media caught and arrested by time. My decision to first initiate change then keeping, as if in amber for unspecified periods of more time I cannot imagine…all just as is, as it was.
I feel akin to the diarists Samuel Pepys, Lewis Carroll, and Virginia Woolf.
Joseph Kinnebrew
January 2022