Entering artist Pawel Kruk’s exhibit is to bear a tense atmosphere; I’m not sure if each piece really peeled away layers of the artist’s (and spectator’s) personal anxiety or if each piece added to the anxiousness of the one before it.

When I walked in, a man was seated at a table under round lights, heavy and clinical like lights in the OR or an interrogation room. There was a TV set with a man reciting contemplations on art, distance, solitude and the material world; the audio for this video installation seemed to be coming from the back room, so I start there.

The measured beats between the man’s monologue and the images shown in the video create tenseness: the poetics of space. The set in the video has been replicated in the front room of the gallery. The objects that are shown are presented close-up and often off-center with much negative space taking up the shot. When viewing the set from the front room, rather than the back room, the multiplicity of objects and recreation of the set adds an unsettling feeling of I’ve been here before. Most of the video is narrated with shots of the man spliced in between. These shots are all from the same time and place as the video being shown in the front room. The difference here is that the back room seeks to examine each object from the front room. The multiplicity of media show the specific relationship attempted between images and materials.

The man is haunted by and obsessed with the limits of his ability as an artist; these thoughts are unshakeable. What the man is reciting turns up again in the front room of the gallery. He has reenacted seven pages from the first chapter of a novel are framed on one of the walls, with the artist’s personal edits to the text. The feelings of unease are revisited, surfacing again upon every viewing of each object in the gallery. This assertion of obsession and the artist’s “task of making art and realizing the distance between oneself and things” affirm that solitude and isolation are important parts of the process. It feels we’ve come across and intense stage, a process of discovery.

These objects and images and texts are repurposed and reallocated: the repetition and reappearance of them throughout the gallery serve to surprise and yet not surprise.

But how does all this relate to the seemingly random fictions of electrocuted sheep, racial lynching that presumably don’t speak to the same issues? They cite elements that attract Kruk’s attention: the seemingly improbable, the fateful. These are crisis moments.

--Jolene Torr

(Image: Pawel Kruk, Untitled 2009; Courtesy Pawel Kruk)