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Josh Kolbo, Installation view at Tony Wight Gallery, Chicago, 2011
Courtesy of the Artist, Société, Berlin and Tony Wight Gallery, Chicago

MEET
Brooklyn-based artist Josh Kolbo

November 9 2012
11:12 AM

Brooklyn artist Josh Kolbo transports his photographs from the print shop to his studio in rolls wrapped in manila envelopes. It is an understated treatment for works produced by means of an extraordinary process. Shot onto 35 mm film, each print is 22 feet long which, as far as printing goes, is a technical feat. Kolbo experiments with the physical boundaries of the medium. His photographs are usually double-exposed and capture discernible but abstracted content from his studio. Images are joined back-to- back. The content of each image is camouflaged by color filters through a process of analog happenstance that nevertheless resonates with the aesthetics of a digital age. Once laminated, the artist exhibits his prints by manipulating them into sculptural forms that often cascade down a supporting wall. Installed, they call into mind the stark monumentality of Modernist sculpture, while echoing the physical mannerism of film itself. Kolbo levels the playing field between content and materiality, treating both with equal importance in what he has long called an act of “horizontal thinking.” Kolbo recently presented a Frame project with his Berlin gallery Société at Frieze Art Fair in London. (Alhena Katsof)