Craig Kalpakjian If You See Something, Say Something
October 22 – November 27, 2004
Gallery 2

Andrea Rosen Gallery is delighted to announce our second solo exhibition by Craig Kalpakjian, an artist the gallery has championed and exhibited since 1995.

Kalpakjian's current project builds on the psychological terrain mapped out in his previous body of work. Moving outdoors and focusing on exteriors but still looking at boundaries and the distinction between interior and exterior; the new body of work explores a landscape of absence, but more pronouncedly one of desolation and abandonment, barren and derelict, focusing on the broken, soiled, defiled, and tarnished. Kalpakjian's previously vacant spaces are now occupied by implication. Although they are still un-peopled, the sense of presence is evident in echoes of what transpired before and hints of what may come to pass. Evocative titles such as , "In The Moment", "You Said You'd Take Care Of It" and "Dear Tech Support Operator" add to the ambiguous narrative and undercut the moodiness with a sense of humor, albeit a dark one.

Despite his use of computer program technology, Kalpakjian is also allied with traditional photographic concerns, primarily light. Although the use of technology could allow for a total control, Kalpakjian's process is riddled with layers of the unknown due to the nature of light, which Kalpakjian has given its own reign. Unanticipated elements alter the process and the outcome is strengthened by such unknowns. Kalpakjian's thinking is revealed through the presentation of multiple variations of eight different images. Both containing an interest in the indefinite, Kalpakjian's conceptual point of view and process effectively fold into one.

An excerpt from an ongoing video project entitled "Frequency" will also be presented. A computer generated animation based loosely upon Michael Snow's seminal film "Wavelength," "Frequency" will be comprised of a single, extended, point of view tracking shot proceeding down a lengthy hallway. Proceeding at a glacial place, the final hour long video will embody the narrative possibilities within Robert Smithson's famous quote proclaiming that one pebble moving one foot in two million years is enough action to keep me really excited.

As a whole, the exhibition becomes a visually existential experience akin to Kafka's quotation:
As someone said to me - I can't remember now who it was - it is really remarkable that when you wake up in the morning you nearly always find everything in exactly the same place as the evening before. For when asleep and dreaming you are, apparently at least, in an essentially different state from that of wakefulness; and therefore, as that man truly said, it requires enormous presence of mind or rather quickness of wit, when opening your eyes to seize hold as it were of everything in the room at exactly the same place where you had let it go on the previous evening. That was why, he said, the moment of waking up was the riskiest moment of the day. Once that was well over with without deflecting you from your orbit, you could take heart of grace for the rest of the day.
- Franz Kafka