Master Series
TOMFOOLERY IN THE ANTRHROPOCINE
A Solo Exhibition of Works by Guy Kinnear
Artist Statement
Golem is a Jewish word meaning “unformed” or “imperfect”. In the Jewish scriptures, it is used to describe humanity at the moment before receiving the breath of life, or the human fetus as it is still just forming in the mother’s womb. In Jewish Folklore, it is also the title of multiple versions of a wonder tale, where a Rabi was able to create an animated human form out of clay and animates it to help the community in its need. The golem lives because it belongs. It belongs to the divine, the world, and the community. It has a place in the cosmos.
Other cultures have parallel tales in the characters of the Homunculus, Pygmalion, Frankenstein’s Wretch, Pinocchio, Androids, and the Automaton. I consider that these tales have implications for the Anthropocene on a macro level, and human wholeness on a personal level. As such, they have become central to my work as my family repositions as creatures living creatively with a place in the cosmos, rather than as humans using technology in competition against nature.
Bio
Some years ago, my family and I left Los Angeles to return to our rural roots and live off-the-grid in a lovely place where even GPS gets lost. Here we produce our own electricity, pump our own water, process our own trash, and we are working on growing food and raising animals. Intending to “go natural’, reduce our carbon footprint and reconnect with earth, we discovered just how synthetic we really were after decades of living urban. Being artists, we have processed our reengagement with the land through creating these Golems as a team, and staging them in the land we live on. I then take these stagings and turn them into paintings using classical oil painting techniques, with my family continuing to act as my creative think tank for concepts and compositions.
Our new life on the land has now expanded my understanding of the other to include animals, plants, land, and water. Philosophically, this is my foundation of embodied life, faith, and the arts: no divisions, the three feed and support each other.
