Art
SLC hosts Kulok’s illuminated photos
by Bethany Altschwager
Monday November 14, 2005
Introduced by Professor Joel Sternfeld as a "young Mozart," Barney Kulok spoke to an intimate group of Sarah Lawrence students and faculty on his photographic and video work.
The event concludes the month-long exhibition of Kulok’s illuminated photographs and his video collaboration with Sebastian Bear-McClard.
Kulok is the first in a series of young, emerging artists selected by Sarah Lawrence faculty to display their work and lecture at the college.
Kulok’s photographs and video installations use the available, artificial light of Queens’ landscape showing a unique amalgamation of light, color and time.
His photographs are mounted on light boxes and shown illuminated in the darkened gallery.
Sternfeld, who organized the event, explained that "the highest moment in art is a unity of form and content."
Kulok achieves this in his use of artificial light with a light box and "the artificially lit art object."
Kulok explained that when he was creating this body of work, luminosity was what he was after.
He compared looking at pictures in the dark to the experience of cinema.
The historic invention of the electric light bulb, the Leica camera and the flash bulb have "enlarged the realm of the visible" he explained.
Kulok referred to his artistic antecedents, which included Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Hopper (not a photographer but a painter of night life), Brassaï, Berenice Abbott, Weegee (Arthur Fellig), André Kertész, Walker Evans, Robert Adams, and Tim Davis, but noted that while they were night photographers, they did not use the light of night for their photographs.
During the lecture, Kulok screened a film he shot in the style of photographs. He described the film as utterly boring, adding, "I have evidence that it is worse than any Kevin Costner movie ever made."
However, after shooting the film he described the difficulty he had returning to photography, he was "frustrated by the stillness of the frame."
It was this frustration and the early motion photography work of Eadweard Muybridge that inspired his video collaboration with Bear-McClard.
His video installation shows the changing light of the world’s largest LED screen in its immediate environment.
The installations are separate shots on television monitors that play distinct loops depicting the light as it changes, creating, in effect, a moving still picture with a definite sense of time.
In case you missed the exhibit or simply have an interest in seeing more of Kulok’s work you can check out his website www.barneykulok.net.
As a part of the Emerging Artists series, P. Duke Riley’s work is currently on display in the Barbara Walters Gallery in Heimbold.
