Kolker’s works, although minimal in shape and form, are filled with light, space and their mirrored reflections as an illusion. They evoke the same serene meditative feelings as viewing a starry night sky. For Kolker, the real and the imaginary have become indistinguishable, a virtual reality. If you sense it, feel it, it is real!
Kolker’s work also requires an understanding of the digital culture in which the contemporary viewer is already deeply immersed. She is psychologically programmed into becoming a virtual –computer-simulated while hinged to her cell phone, computer and television screens. This new media culture has become her autonomic or knee-jerk way of seeing her screen-world of dots and pixels. She barely notices that which she sees on her screens is merely a reflection of the real, while she, like Alice in Wonderland, lives an imaginary life. Kolker, with his iconic dots and LEDs dancing out toward infinity…startles her, like a pinch-test, as a reminder to notice that which is, really, real! The feelings, of course!
Kolker’s avant-garde light and space sculpture has been exhibited at The Big Light Show at Anderson Ranch Art Center, Snowmass, Colorado in 2010 and most recently at Hofstra University, Uniondale, New York. Although he could be directly compared to contemporary members of the Young Light Artists, Kolker’s origins of his works date back to the 1970s, when fluxus and minimalist artists explored new technologies and developed new media for their art. Kolker, in 1975 built a media room mirrored on all sides, with a satellite receiver and front end projector television which became his laboratory for light optics and color theory. The low resolution screen image, which sent large colored dots streaming their repeating reflections in the mirrored walls, became the point of first impression for Kolker’s works.
The exhibition features a light sculpture of live fish in a mirrored aquarium creating the illusion of an almost infinite reflection of fish in motion. Kolker tests the viewer’s perception of the real, as in an experiment, using the viewer as the measuring instrument. The aquarium represents the microcosm of a world filled with both real things and their repeating reflections that seem to go on forever. Although Kolker set out to simply title the work, Reflections of the Real, his staff helped him to re-title the work, The Human Condition, after Magritte’s paintings, La Condition Humaine, to teach us of the improbability and impossibility of infinite life and that our real existence is ephemeral. Fortunately, we continue to fool ourselves with our self-painted trompe l’oeilles and the virtual reality of our worlds of smoke, mirrors and pixilated screens, while living in denial of our mortality.
In Paul Kolker: The Dot Is In!…Reflections Of The Real, thirty-six light sculptures are on view downstairs at the salon of Studio601 511 West 25th Street between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, from June 28 through September 6, 2012.