Dynamic Duo! I’m offering two salt prints from my personal collection for the Plains Art Museum benefit auction, held August 13 at 7pm CST. They have been good to me and I wish to return the favor. The photographs are part of the project, The Best of the Best, created in the year R. J. Kern was chosen as the Commemorate Artist for the 2019 Minnesota State Fair. Learn more about this photographic series here >>
Each print includes a signed certificate of authenticity with an informational sticker label on verso. These are unique works (no two are alike), :
Supreme Champion Rabbit Matching Male / Female Pair, 2019
Gold-toned salt print with lavender oil and white beeswax, 8 x 10 inches
Framed with Optium UV acrylic, 13 x 15 inches (Starting bid $450)
Supreme Champion Goose Male / Female Pair, 2019
Gold-toned salt print with lavender oil and white beeswax, 8 x 10 inches
Framed with Optium UV acrylic, 13 x 15 inches (Starting bid $450)
View the works at the the Take Two: Déjà Vu, Summer Gala Auction Exhibition at the Plains Art Museum in Fargo, ND from July 15 thru August 13, 2021.
Can’t make the Gala? Still want to bid? Early bidding begins online Friday August 6.
Essay Excerpt by Anjuli J. Lebowitz:
Do animals have a claim on history? Is culture expressed in the shape of a beak, girth of an udder or the slope of a snout? With their abbreviated lifespans, do they carry cultural memory in their feathers, fur, and hides? These are the questions R. J. Kern poses in The Best of the Best. With twelve pairs of animals—one female, one male—Kern intertwines the history of animal competitions with the history of photography to explore some of humanity’s most urgent questions about its relationship to its fellow earthly creatures and their interwoven fates. Kern’s intricate prints, which layer salt prints over digital prints, foreground historical inquiry, human intervention, and nature’s persistence.
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Kern weaves these together through the warp and weft of sepia and scarlet, matte and glossy, salt and blood paying tribute to the histories of photography and animal competitions while laying a path for the evolution of the one and the preservation of the other.
– Excerpt from the essay, Salt of the Earth: R. J. Kern’s The Best of the Best, by Anjuli J. Lebowitz, Department of Photographs, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
The catalog for the Plains Art Museum Summer Gala 2021 auction.