About Bear Kirkpatrick

Artist Bear Kirkpatrick challenges that the visible world is merely a collective experience we humans perceive as reality.  Perception of everything could never be possible, so our mind is forced to make choices.  Kirkpatrick’s works reclaim some of what we forgot to remember, lost ability to perceive, or simply cannot compute.

We carry with us into this life more than simply the codes for the present . . . and if we carry inherited physical and behavioral traits, wouldn’t we also carry traits of consciousness?  We are a learned thing, an ever-gathering animal- nothing is lost.   - Bear Kirkpatrick     

It may be frightening to consider that we harbor things within us that are unknown.  We know the universe is limitless, but knowledge still fails to make all apparent.  Kirkpatrick’s work reminds us that for all we see, and all we know, and all we are - we are mortal.  Being human is imperfect, it is incomplete, it is ephemeral.  Though we will not exist forever, what we are of has existed forever.  Kirkpatrick's contemporary photography dredges up hidden layers and offers us a revised glimpse of the fiber that makes the thread of the blanket of the eternal.     

Wallportraits by Bear Kirkpatrick

Hierophanies by Bear Kirkpatrick

Fine art photographer Bear Kirkpatrick earned his B.A. from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and MFA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.