Jonny Kinsman's Projects

BFA Student

Major: Photography

Graduation Year: 2019

Artist Statement:

My work is an attempt to rekindle the childhood curiosity of the world beyond the tree line, fictionalizing the stranger I have never met, in a place I have never been. I look for areas isolated in their unique identities, from the coastal motel kingdoms to the mill town known by the locals as “Cancer Valley.” I make photos that elicit a social fragility in a vacated landscape, seeking places that bear an emotional undercurrent with the people that surround them. Through my process I engage with the environment and temporary neighbors to further bridge these symbiotic relationships that we share with one another and the landscapes that define us. Loneliness is an emotion that seems to swell up in the colder half of a northern year, illustrating itself into these landscapes. My work is navigating the evidence that is left amongst it. Where the smell of a stranger's fire is reassurance that a community exists beyond the tree line.

Biography:

Jonny Kinsman is a fine art photographer who lives and works out of Portland Maine. Jonny has been featured in many groupshows and articles around the Portland area, including the annual Bakery Photo Collective show Photo-A-GoGo, as well as having work shown in the Maine College of Art and the Maine Audubon Society. Jonnys work talks about dislocation, loneliness, and the rural american landscape. Jonny was born in rural South Dakota and seeks to find communities that are unique in their identities reminiscent of his own, from the people who call it home, to the landscape that illustrates these concepts.