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Jeremy Thomas Kunkel (Born 1970 in El Centro, California) A painter, photographer, printmaker, sculptor and installation artist. As a mixed and multi-media artist since the early 1990's Jeremy Thomas Kunkel has shown in museums and exhibited in numerous galleries in the U.S. and abroad.

Biography, Career and Art

Jeremy Thomas Kunkel established himself initially in the Los Angeles area during the early 1990's as a fine art Photographer and darkroom printer, he has referenced his influences as being PhotographerWilliam Mortensen and PhotojournalistW. Eugene Smith. Having started in the mid 1980's Kunkel spent endless hours as a teenager in a small makeshift trailer darkroom in his parents backyard. Entering into the 1990's his printing methods expanded and came to incorporate darkroom manipulation techniques such as creative bleaching working with liquid silver emulsion, often producing images of landscapes and of the human form on a variety of surfaces such as wood panels, metal doors, glass and often different types of papers often unattainable in the darkroom process. Eventually after much experimentation he created a process, method of printing, he self identified as the Contage Print. A term fashioned after and with respect to both the collage and montage methods. This method requires the use of hand applied silver emulsion, and unlike a montage it requires a minimum of two physical surfaces to overlap each other (as does a collage), but also, and at the same time, requires a minimum of two photographically projected and printed images to overlap as well.

In the late 1990's Jeremy Thomas Kunkel introduced himself to painting in a formal setting as well as through self exploration. Around this time he met and began several collaborative efforts with different local Los Angeles artists, primarily and most consistently with Los Angeles Based artist Gronk. His work continued with Gronk for two years and resulted in a cumulative series of shows consisting of paintings, photographs and video installations. During this period he pushed, as his interest in collaborative work expanded, to include other artists. At one point he was invited and accepted a collaboration with opera director Peter Sellars on a Jean Genet play (Les Paravents, The Screens). Moving away from his formal studies in the arts Jeremy Thomas Kunkel continued to exhibit in the Los Angeles area with galleries and Museum shows. In the summer of 1997 he completed a residency for the Center Of Land Use Interpretation, a residency which culminated into a permanent installation of the work Five Interpreted Views, or also referred to as "an Obscura Excursion". This work consists of five camera obscuras built in the landscape near the Bonneville Salt Flats at the historic Wendover Air Force Base in Utah, near other artist work such as the The Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson, The Sun Tunnels by artist Nancy Holt and the Tree of Utah by Karl Momen. His Camera Obscuras are discussed in written works such as La Playa Works; Myth of the Empty by William L. Fox, a Professor at Nevada University. In 1998 he was commissioned to complete a sculpture for the main Fed Ex facility in Culver City California. The completed work was a 16 foot stainless steel pendulum suspended in the lobby stairwell with human figures extruding from the top. Unfortunately this, along with several other pieces in the lobby, were apart of an elaborate art heist in 2012, the work has since to be seen or reported. In the beginning of 2000 Jeremy Thomas Kunkel was commissioned to complete a series of ten paintings to represent several large organizations such as the Childrens Hospital of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Edison and several others in a joint effort with Arts Incorporated to benefit the arts in downtown Los Angeles. Following an abrupt relocation to the Washington D.C. Area Jeremy Thomas Kunkel expanded into printmaking utilizing zinc plate,  solar plate and lino-cut techniques. However upon returning to painting he began incorporating visual and physical 3-dimensional works. The recent exhibits "Periphanatic" and "Father Points North", are excellent examples where components of paintings, and some photographs, physically jut out and seem to detach themselves from the work itself. Most recent work By Jeremy Thomas Kunkel are his sculptural Simulacrum pieces which essentially consist of a sculpture enclosed inside of a box with a light reflecting off the sculpture and projecting through a lens onto a frosted glass view screen. The intent of the work as described by Kunkel is "to intentionally withdraw the real origin, the original, and only offer the image of the real. Our real is only presented in description and presented though imagery".