Craig Kalpakjian

Kalpakjian emerged onto the New York art scene during the early 1990s as a sculptor and installation artist with work reflecting his interest in technologies of control, containment, and security.[7] This work utilized bulletproof Plexiglas bankteller windows, waiting line stanchions, and security tags—items associated with contemporary paranoia and social control.[8] Though taken out of context these objects still retained a significant aspect of their functionality. Inspired by minimalism and conceptual art, this work was a sort of hybrid between sculpture and installations, employing barriers, waiting lines and other objects that control the way we move through space.[9] These were included in important New York group exhibitions of the ’90’s, such as those organized by Colin De Land, Kenny Schachter, and Eric Oppenheim, and including other artists emerging at the time such as Andrea Zittel, Rachel Harrison, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Gary Simmons, Jutta Koether, and Ricci Albenda.[10]

Using software like AutoCAD and Form-Z, Kalpakjian started making digitally rendered photographic images and video animations of institutional spaces devoid of human occupants, spaces often subjected to the same intensive systems of control and surveillance he explored in his earlier work.[7] These works have been described as hermetic, airless, depicting “a world without depth, in which reality, gradually engulfed by the relentless proliferation of digital information, disappears.”[9]

The video animation Corridor, included in 010101: Art In Technological Times at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, consists of a single shot of a curving office corridor that slowly advances. Described as “eerie and vaguely sinister, conjuring a sense of claustrophobia and infinity at the same time... Kalpakjian's deceptively plausible computer-generated animation becomes an apt metaphor for the impersonal spaces of corporate architecture."[11] Since 1999, Corridor has been included in the collections at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.[12]

The theme of control remained central to Kalpakjian's rendered still images. Depicting darkened, windowless hallways in mute palettes, duct systems embedded within the infrastructure of buildings, at times presented from impossible points of view, many of these works feature the "invisible eyes" and other remote-viewing sensory devices that map actual space with blankets of virtual electronic surveillance.[13] These images have also been said to function by foreclosing all possibility of human entry.[14]

In 2002 Kalpakjian exhibited the installation Black Box at Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York. This work included a Sony AIBO robot pet dog enclosed in a sealed box reminiscent of an “operant conditioning chamber,” or Skinner box, used by researchers to study the behavior of animals in a controlled environment. Each day during the exhibit the dog would take a photograph of the interior of the box. The images were sent wirelessly to a computer and the prints of these photographs were displayed on the gallery wall beside the box. The installation was later included in the 2013 Montreal Photo biennale Le Mois de la Photo à Montreal,[15] titled Drone: The Automated Image, at Vox – Centre de l’image contemporaine, curated by Paul Wombell.[7]

Black Box was the subject of the book Intelligence released by Sternberg Press in 2017.[7]

Michael Ashkin writes that Craig Kalpakjian’s "Recent abstract works continue his explorations of spatial visualization. Using non-standard types of perspective, these large-scale inkjet prints present illusions of dimensionality that trouble the distinctions between inside and outside, artifice and reality".[16]

His 2017 exhibit at Kai Matsumiya gallery in New York included a number of large scale prints as well as an installation incorporating a robotic moving head spotlight hanging from an intrusive metal truss.[4][17][3]