Bear Kirkpatrick is an American artist who began taking photographs at age 13 with a pinhole camera he made from a shoebox.  This device and pursuit became his first means of exploring the mystery of the world through art.  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 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.

The focus of Mr. Kirkpatrick’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.