The text (followed by flying saucers, crop circles, and ancient iconography) in Grimes' We Must Collect refers to what he perceives as meaningful coincidences and mistakes in earthly writings about interstellar communications.
A few years after Ken Grimes had his first psychotic break, he started putting some of his ideas about extraterrestrials on canvas. Two decades later, the schizophrenic artist has seen his work appear in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Outsider Art Fair, and New York's Ricco/Maresca Gallery. "We get so accustomed to seeing the same thing," says Leslie Umberger, senior curator at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center. But Grimes actually accomplishes "what many artists aspire to: changing the way we see and think."
So how does Grimes think? For one, he disagrees with ufologists who say aliens "would come to Earth to help us build pyramids or Easter Island." Alien communication is more subtle than that, he says. That's why he began looking for evidence of hidden messages in contemporary texts—particularly ones about radio astronomy and the star Epsilon Eridani. He's hunting for inconsistencies and synchronicities that are too remarkable to result from chance or human fallibility. These strange errors, he reasons, must be a form of communication.
"These are professional writers who have editors and proofreaders," he says, but who still make patterns of mistakes. "They're experiencing alien spirituality. It's right in their face and they can't even see it." So Grimes paints them a picture.
