Divine Animals: Photographs by R. J. Kern

Opening reception: 
Thursday, August 29th, 2024

4:00 - 7:00pm
During the Historic Valley Junction Farmer's Market  

Join us for the opening reception of a mid-career retrospective of photographs by R. J. Kern. See how Kern's interest in animals, community, photography, and light combine in large and small scale photographic prints and artist books.  

R. J. Kern (b. 1978) is an American artist whose work investigates ideas of home, ancestry, and a sense of place. His portraits focus on intimate, interdependent relationships of people, animals, and landscape as a means of exploring how ancestry shapes identity and how myth intertwines with personal history. His camera has led him from an inquiry into his lineage in the farming communities of Scandinavia and Ireland to the examination of similar communities near his home in Minnesota. Increasingly, his attention has been captured by the next generation of young people, who may or may not be the stewards of rural communities and economies in the future. Inspired by master landscape painters of the 19th-century, Kern embraces the heightened expressivity of natural and artificial lighting techniques.