I guess it’s appropriate when your first name is Bear, that you would make photographs about our relationship to the natural world. And if your name is Bear Kirkpatrick, you also bring a life well lived to that work. “Although in the years since he has published short stories, had a screenplay produced into a full-length feature, has made custom furniture for Bono and Adam Clayton, has exhibited furniture, jewellery, photography and sculpture throughout the United States, including the Society for Arts and Crafts in Boston, and the Rogin Gallery in New York, photography continues to be the primary focus of his artistic pursuit. Presently, he lives in Portsmouth, NH and works work with the American artist Robert Wilson as the chief installer of his video portraits in private residences, museums, and galleries around the world.” Bear’s work was recently featured in Eyemazing Magazine and has work for sale through the Eyemazing Editions collection.

The focus of Bear’s work is to create a framework that explores mankind’s relationship to himself and to his animalness by developing narratives that attempt to create an image of man that is simultaneously primal and fully modern. Through this juxtaposition he posits that the basic tenets of the human condition have not disappeared beneath the flash of our contrivances or been abolished by any contemporary idea of progress.

By viewing mankind with the same lens through which he or she examines the natural world, and by swapping the object for the subject, he reveals the eternal struggle to define for ourselves an understanding of our place within a contemporary social relationship to the sacred and the profane.