Memory plays a central role in Kincaid’s painting-photography discourse. He relates the shifting nature of memories to the construct of digital painting. “As we progress further from our experience, an increasing amount of our memory tends to be supplanted by our mental construct of that memory,” says Kincaid. “In a certain passage of time, our recollection of an event becomes fabricated.” Just as cognitive fragments piece together narrative memories, digitally-created elements reinterpret the reality of a photograph.
- Georgia Museum of Art
NOT FOR ANOTHER HOUR, BUT THIS HOUR continues the artist’s exploration of digitally manufactured realities and the veracity of the photographic image through works that resonate with an elegant and somber beauty. One immediately recalls the words of Herman Melville and Walt Whitman when confronted with these impressive new works. Kincaid’s sharp aesthetic turn from the minimalist compositions and cloudscapes that initially brought him critical attention has come to its fruition in a body of work that seduces the viewer to enter into the artist’s sublimely manufactured histories. Delicate works on paper evoke the nautical explorations of our dreams, bringing to vivid life a journey across the seas, when such adventures still represented a leap of both faith and imagination. These works, though seemingly pulled from some other place and time, are in fact superb representations of the digital skill Kincaid has slowly mastered, to manufacture an eminently believable, but ultimately imaginary reality. Like our memories themselves, Kincaid’s images represent the construct of narrative from cognitive fragments and bits we piece together in an effort to remember.