Conceptually, Kolker uses the Kabbalah dictum of tikkun (Hebrew, meaning perfection) as our mandate to continue the creative process of perfecting the world and humankind. His work continues to engage a magnetism between empiricism (in our world of experiences and experiments) and spirituality (in that abstract world of feelings). As you will see in this show, Kolker conflates experience, experiment and feelings within his process-driven, colorful and concept-laden works.
Kolker’s work is founded in our popular digital culture using the pixilation of camera, computer, cell phone and television screens; the solitary dot of the digital screen has become his brand mark. The planet Earth, constituting our world, is merely a dot in space and time.
As in art, much like as in life, the closer we are to our subject, the more obscure is our perception. What is abstract, or cellular, or pixilated, or molecular, or sub-atomic is merely a “dot.” Taking the customary “three steps back”, the image perceived becomes more highly defined and we no longer see the dots. To Kolker, this optical phenomenon becomes high definition interacting with the minimalist low definition dot through a dynamic zoom apparatus iterating the view up close with the view from afar.
Zoom in to the eponymously named painting “Happy Birthday, World!” (2008, acrylic and silkscreen on canvas, a fracolor in sixteen parts, 96 x 96 inches) and you will find 17,424 dots configuring a transformed NASA image of our blue planet when you zoom out. Note that the sum of the integers of the total number of dots equals nine…just shy of reaching that Buberian “tenth rung” of perfection, or tikkun, in the Kabbalah. Our world continues to need us to perfect it and humankind. So, Happy Birthday, World!
Paul Kolker: Happy Birthday, World! — Opening September 25, 2008.