The Long Drive Home

Paul Kolker is pleased to present The Long Drive Home at the PAUL KOLKER collection from July 19 through September 13, 2018. This exhibition of so-called synthèse paintings, which are both abstract and figural, and light sculpture is produced and curated by the artist as an experiment in perception. The artist’s essay, The Long Drive Home, accompanies the exhibition; and in this release, it follows in italics.

THE LONG DRIVE HOME

• The resolution of the image projected on the six foot wide screen of my 1975 Advent television was only 9 dots per square inch. From up close the image was barely recognizable and abstract. Based on today’s digital camera back technology, when sitting ten feet away from that Advent screen the calculated resolution on my retina approached 240 dpi; and my perception of the projected image was highly defined. Watching television, videos and live satellite feeds on that curved screen was my tutorial in visual perception for twenty-five years until the projector died. Up close I saw a low definition image of more than quarter inch dots. At ten feet from the screen, I could welcome President Ronald Reagan and late night host, Johnny Carson into my home through virtual reality.
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• When message screens of RGB light emitting diodes finally became available in the mid 1980s, Sony developed the JumboTron, a 130 feet wide screen installed in Tampa Stadium, FL with individual LEDs much smaller than the dots on my Advent screen. Today’s display screens and printed pages are replete with thousands of dots which have begotten more and more dots through advancing technologies in television, video and photography; from 480 to 720 to 1080 to 4K resolution and beyond. As a result, I believe that we have become desensitized and pay scant attention to those dots even though we know they exist on our screens as liquid crystal diodes or organic light emitting diodes. Because we all suffer from ‘inattentional blindness,’ described by perceptual psychologists Irvin Rock and Arien Mack in 1992, the dot used or referenced in my art has become my focal point to remind us that in our high definition wide screen view of the metaphorical forest, there are also trees and leaves with dew drops and respiration pores that look like dots.
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• Therefore, this show is about paying attention. Driving demands attentiveness on the Long Island Expressway (LIE) and crosstown from the Queens Midtown Tunnel (QMT) to Chelsea; especially on the long drive home to Old Westbury using that same route in the darkness. Although this experiment has been ongoing for the eighteen years I have been commuting regularly by car from Old Westbury to Chelsea, the improving technology of remote control blue tooth and the Uber inspired dash mounts have made the so-called ‘dash cam’ videography with my iPhone a new medium for my art process. And of course, we must pay attention while viewing art. Otherwise there could be a gorilla in the room, to which we are blinded for our lack of paying attention.
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• The show is also about photography. Before the dash cam and IPhone I used a palm sized digital camera with autofocus. Because the LIE is said to be the world’s longest parking lot, most of the pictures in my LIE labeled archive display a fully stopped bumper to bumper traffic of cars, motorcycles and trucks and the angry facial expressions of their drivers and passengers. That exhibition is forthcoming as a study of a tedious and torturous form of human captivity; a sort of Stockholm Syndrome of adoration for Robert Moses while listening to QXR or NPR or an emotional stimulus for a manic road rage once the traffic started moving again. I am one regular LIE commuter who lovingly suffers from Stockholm and listens to NPR and QXR. I am not angry. I have exhibited no rage. But I complain a lot about my three or more hours of almost daily car travel.
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• The show is also about forward motion; progress and not stasis. The Long Drive Home is my sixty-fifth solo exhibition which I have both produced and curated. The exhibition is the forest. The paintings are the trees. I take my experience and uncloak its substance by photographing it; sometimes in a light field, dark field, underwater, using prismatic or anamorphic lenses… some wide or narrow angled. Or I may photograph through a rain spotted window or windshield as in this show. I carefully study the relevant science of color refraction and the effects of surface tensions of liquids; like a teaming rain with which my wind shield wipers cannot keep up with. My car cam is ready and controlled by my selfie blue tooth remote. The colored light streaks across the windshield and forms like starbursts of solitary color are separated by the refraction of colored light distorted by rain splattering and splashing. My car is stopped at a corner and I shut off the wipers for the water and light color show. But there is much more.

Paul Kolker (b. 1935) is a New York based artist with doctorate degrees in medicine and law. He is Fellow American College of Surgeons, Fellow American College of Legal Medicine and Emeritus Chief of Cardiothoracic Surgery at Northwell Glen Cove Hospital, having practiced cardiothoracic surgery on Long Island from 1969 to 2013. In October 2001, Kolker moved his Long Island studio to his current address in the Chelsea art district so that he could produce his works and curate his exhibitions as an experiment in perception. His studio and gallery have together become his laboratory in which the viewer is the measuring instrument for Kolker’s art as a perceptual experiment. The Long Drive Home is Kolker’s sixty-fifth solo exhibition.

In Paul Kolker: The Long Drive Home, twenty-two works are on view from July 19 through September 13, 2018 at the Paul Kolker collection, 511 West 25th Street in Chelsea, adjacent to the HighLine between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues. For information or press materials, please email info@paulkolker.com.