"Alternate blurred distances and sharply focused foregrounds, in contrast, are a hallmark of photographic depth-of-field, but the digital media used to mingle them is from yet another era. Pieces like Iceberg 713 become especially weird with the inclusion of digital technology; some passages give the impression of a scaled-up miniature, while others are shot in the more traditional documentary sense. That the craftsmanship of these images is totally flawless makes them all the more vexing to decipher."
-Casey Gregory, Arts & Culture Texas
Kincaid's Icebergs are the artist's most concrete nod to the influence 19th Century landscape painting, as well as 19th Century photographic lens-based optics, has had on his working practice. Conceptualized on both paper and canvas, these manufactured seascapes have a brooding, melancholy presence, and the inclusion of shadows of sailing vessels rendered helplessly small in some images adds just enough material to allow the viewer to use their own experiences to craft a narrative in collaboration with the artist.
These works have no photographic elements in them. Kincaid creates shapes, forms, and patterns digitally, then distorts, warps, cuts, pastes, and draws these images, using an aesthetic of shallow depth of field so ever-present in 19th Century photography, to concoct an imaginary, yet somehow believable nautical nonplace. Noticeably, most of these images’ skies are overcast, and most of the seas are unnervingly calm, which adds to the minimal amount of clues the artist is willing to give his viewers as to the time or locations these icebergs inhabit.