buber blau, too, 2009, inkjet and acrylic on canvas, 9801 dots, a fracolor in nine parts, 99 x 99 inches.
Kolker’s work, symbolic of the digital dot of computers, televisions, and cell phones, uses a process called fracolor — of image fractionation by fractal computer graphics and painting with optical and pigment colors, mixed only with black and/or white, resulting in tints and shades, and overlaid with a dot grid. In this show, Kolker weaves the existential ideas of non-verbal or silent communication of Martin Buber’s Ich und Du (I and Thou) with the implications of Marie and Gathie Barnette’s silence — their refusal to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in their public school class, which led to the Supreme Court’s holding that silence is constitutionally protected speech. A series of three large-scale portraits of the sisters, painted in acrylic on canvas, each composed of 17,424 dots, are circumscribed with a grid of red, white, or blue, symbolic of their patriotism for the flag before which they remained silent in accordance with their Jehovah’s Witnesses beliefs.
Buber, You and I know the Reason Why…Go Digital! The Dialogue 2010, installation — studio601, New York, NY
The exhibition also includes four large-scale acrylic and ink paintings on canvas, 99 x 99 inches, with excerpts from Ich und Du overlaid on film positive and negative images of the author. These portraits elucidate Buber’s concept of direct experience, one that is real and perceivable, as a viewer before a work of art exemplifies the “Ich-Du” encounter in which infinity and oneness are united. Variations of experience are iterated in the different tints and shades of the 1936 digital dots composing each of the paintings, buber blau and buber weiss, each at 132 x 132 inches, the blue as the ascendency color of spirituality — “looking skyward,” and the other identical image, in Corot-like clouded white of obscurity.
A large-scale ceiling mural of the American flag and the Pledge of Allegiance is suspended above a mirrored sculpture which repeats the words “I Vow” (a play on “I-Thou”) to infinity. The image of the mural, reflected in the mirrors of the fractal box, draws a tension between the words of the Pledge of Allegiance and the “I Vow” Kol Nidrei nullification. Six wall-mounted fractal boxes of mirror and LED lights repeat geometric shapes as a Mandelbrotian progression of starry dots ad infinitum, while the Buberian dialogues between the viewers and the works…Go Digital!
Paul Kolker: Buber, You and I know the Reason Why…Go Digital! The Dialogue — September 24 through December 10, 2009.