Barney Kulok "In Visible Cities"
Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery
This event has ended.
In an essay published on the occasion of the exhibition, art historian Svetlana Alpers asks: “What is a photographer to do when the phenomenon that interests him is such that a camera is of no use?”
In his second New York solo exhibition Kulok extends his formal inquiry of photography into the realm of painting. On four large-scale monochromatic panels the names of personal wireless Internet networks appear painted in low relief. Hundreds of words are arrayed in grids, creating a horizontal field of names and phrases: PrettyBoy olive in the city GEORGE flywithme sugarbush The Swamp mrsmoustache. The words are simultaneously public and private, fantastical and real, apparent and invisible. These four by eight foot panels sample contemporary experience to conjure a distinct poetics of everyday life. As landscape views they function as representations of both the place depicted and the moment of its recording; each panel documents all the names found between two predetermined points in Manhattan.
Linked to the archival, documentary impulses of Atget, Abbot, and Ruscha, Kulok’s taxonomical approach proposes an expanded definition of the photographic, and questions the role of photography in recording the contemporary environment. Alpers concludes, “despite the fact that the panels were made without the use of a camera, they are continuous with that experience and depiction of the world which only someone with a camera could have imagined doing.”
A book with an essay by Svetlana Alpers and a poem by Ron Padgett accompanies the exhibition.
Media
Schedule
from September 10, 2009 to October 31, 2009
Opening Reception on 2009-09-10 from 18:00 to 20:00