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Craig Kaplpakjian |
The Baukunst Galerie opens on Wednesday, the 20st of June from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m., a great solo-exhibition with works of the artist Craig Kalpakjian, who lives and works in New York City. “Frequencies” is the first exhibition of his œuvre in Germany at all. Beside inkjet prints and an installation of lightboxes, an artist-film will be shown. At the opening Dr. Gregor Jansen, curator at the ZKM in Karlsruhe, will give an introduction in Kalpakjian’s artistic work. Its ambivalent, technological esthetics has already gained great attention in the United States, France, England and Switzerland.
The artist was born in 1961 and completed his “Bachelor of Arts“ in Art History at the University of Pennsylvania in 1983. His works are represented in internationally known museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and they are part of several public collections in Paris, Rome, London, Chicago and Santa Fé (USA).
In his works Craig Kalpakjian explores perception and psychological impact of space. In the early 90s he created sculptural works of concrete symbols of the bureaucratic-institutional space, for example of elements of security and monitoring systems or belts and posts of personal guiding systems. The works control – as hybrids between sculpture and installation in the tradition of Minimalism and Concept Art – our movement in space and influence its perception.
At that time the artist was already less interested in the objects themselves than in their effects on the surrounding space. Therefore it is just logically consistent that Craig Kalpakjian started to produce his works by the computer-aided design software “Form Z” and “Lightscape” in 1999, which allow him to construct space and lightning itself. Starting with a drawing of a simple model he adds with a great perfection in detail light sources and different qualities of surfaces and tones. The final product is a digital construct, which is described by Jean Baudrillard in his “Agony of the Real” as a Simulacrum – a simulation without an appendant original. Although they do not have a counterpart in reality, the digital generated indoor and outdoor spaces seem to be familiar to us from our urban environment. They cite the modern architecture of the “International Style”, which is affected by Functionalism and Rationalism. You can see facades of high-rise buildings, corridors and entrance halls with a color scale of black, grey and blue tones, revealing the influence of Ad Reinhardt’s monochrome paintings. The reduction directs the attention of the beholder to the reflection and refraction of light on the glossy finish high-tech surfaces. The exhibition-title “Frequencies” relies both on the undulated spreading of light and its conditional optical iteration of mirrored items. Transparence and reflection build up a tension, that merges the boundaries between looking at and looking through, between inside and outside, between subject and mirror image. The virtual space seems to be endless because of its prismatic subdivision – an effect which is supported by mirrored sights of the sky. The artist subverts this infinity by holes and cracks in the surfaces, baring nothing than black vacuousness. Thus the constructed virtual world is revealed as mere surface without depth.
Albeit Craig Kalpakjian‘s examples of architecture appear as buildings designed and inhabited by human beings, the human body is entirely absent. It is neither present as a subject, nor as a shadow or a mirrored shape. Just the cinematographic point of view adopts the character of frames and adds a narrative dimension, which is intensified by the associative titles. Empty settings – where an overturned chair and bullet-size holes remind of human violence – turn the spectator into the subject of the image, who fills in the void with his imagination. Moreover the perspective is chosen in a way, that precludes to determine the point of view and the dimensions of the pictured space. This disorientation enforces the psychological impact of the digital photos on the beholder. The same formal principle is pursued in the artist-film “Frequency” from 2007, which is loosely based on the structural movie „Wavelength“ of Michael Snow. By a singular camera shot of a long, uniform corridor slightly moving towards an elevator, Kalpakjian generates a psychological tension, that reminds us of films by Stanley Kubrick and opens up a broaden projection screen for the fantasy of the spectator.
Craig Kalpakjian creates in his works digital “non-places“, whose sterile perfection and monotony become metaphors of the artificiality of our modern environment: the most surfaces surrounding us are products of technological processes; human services are more and more substituted by machines; since many years industrial products and entire buildings are computer-aided designed; thereby economic considerations eliminate all unessential details. Craig Kalpakjian’s works reveal the terms and conditions of the prevalent modern principles of effectiveness, rationalism and functionalism.
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