Light Sleep
The disused, unloved, abandoned things that squat lonesome and forgotten are the stars and curious specimens of Peter Kozak’s video work. His camera lovingly fixates or violently inspects them, allowing their figures to move in and out focus in a mesmerizing, swirling loop. The result of this obsessive documentation is a transformation of sorts. Kozak peels away the context of the objects for them to sit naked in front of his lens. Through the process of transmuting physical material into pixels that are then meticulously cut and edited, they mutate into blotchy marks of intimate human experiences and relations. These marks are sometimes beautiful, sad, funny and/or squeamish but all pulse with something that we can recognise or relate to but can’t immediately define. A memory, a feeling or whatever it is that these videos conjure within you is contained, sealed and silently throbs under the skin of these objects. They often lay dead around us, ignored and useless but in Kozak’s work they animate, becoming authentic emblems of trudging through life with all its unsightly gorey-ness, its sad greyness as well as its beautiful absurdness. .
In the video Bloodstain Kozak’s camera work becomes creepily invasive, moving up, down and around in an intense close up of an object. The object in question is filmed, edited and then blown up onto a cinema sized screen becoming a queasy, nondescript bodily mark. The more Kozak hones in on it, blocking out its environment and its body as a whole to the viewer, the more abstract, visceral and confusing it becomes. Details blur and disintegrate to then reform before suddenly jumping to shaky close ups of a dark, crusted mark, held in such proximity that the lens almost pushes up against it. This type of extreme camera work is not far away from a similar trope employed in horror and porno films, where materials such as blood, sweat, sperm and flesh are shown in such concentrated detail they become obscured and shift into something other. However, the punch in the video comes after realizing the banal source of all these nauseating colours and textures.
DISCLAIMER: IF YOU HAVEN’T FIGURED OUT WHAT THE THING IN THE BIG VIDEO IS DON’T READ ANY FURTHER. GO BACK AND WATCH THE FUCKING VIDEO.
To the perceptive viewer, the visual clues slowly start to generate an outline and the identity of the object surfaces. A used bandaid. Its history is left ambiguous. Was it left on the street or is it the artist’s own? That doesn’t matter, because in the video it is the people’s bandaid. The stain becomes a unifying stain, reminding us that we have all been cut, and then bled and have then tried to apply an adhesive bandage to it, making that same gross mark that we see projected up on the big screen. And maybe those tiny, dark gaps in the bandaid’s spongy material are wormholes, ripping us through time and space back to those intimate moments or vulnerable states when skin (be it yours or someone else’s) has been torn, burned or slashed open.
The Bridge similarly morphs the hackneyed into emotive tokens of experience but through inverting the method used in Bloodstain. Shown lying prostrate on the gallery floor, the work is a three channel video depicting baubles flailing and spasming around in front of a bright blue backdrop. The middle channel gives the clearest view of the baubles at their most playfully energetic while the others that bookend it shows them blurred and smudged. Analogously to Bloodstain, the baubles are dislocated from their environment through clever camera work but instead of spastic, close up photography, the camera is still and frames them in a featureless blue. Our attention is directed purely at the baubles dynamic, unrestrained wriggling which, in turn, sheds them of immediate identification.
Watching the videos I find that they are all thread together by a certain kind of weariness, as though the camera itself is drifting in and out of consciousness. Things blur before sharpening to then blur again. Solid objects liquefy into residual streaks of colour that then contort back into something that is both recognisable yet alien. I find they mimic my vision when falling in and out of sleep, when memories and feelings that have stayed dormant for years are brought forward by the most stupid and mundane things, pulling me back out of my slumber just as my eyelids drop. Except in Kozak’s work, they never drop. The videos are caught in an endless state of light sleepy-ness, relentlessly looping the same thing over and over until meaning, memories and feelings ooze out of them.