Taking its title from the sea nymphs in Homer’s Odyssey—the treacherous spirits whose sweet voices lured sailors to their death upon the rocks—Sirens presents four hallucinatory scenes, visual puns authored by a mischievous agent. Mocking laughter that shatters the illusion and causes viewers to doubt the assumptions implicit in their viewing disrupts stills of what seem to be unpopulated landscapes.
This title is also available on Sympathetic Vibrations: The Videoworks of Paul Kos.
Paul Kos has been an artist and teacher for 35 years. He responds to simple, humble materials and the indigenous elements of specific sites, which he mines for their physical properties and metaphoric possibilities. Everything Matters, a traveling retrospective of his work, was organized by the University of California Berkeley Art Museum in 2003. Kos's installations and videos have also been shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; New Langton Arts, San Francisco; Capp Street Project, San Francisco; Leo Castelli Gallery, New York; M.H. de Young Museum, San Francisco; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco.
The Spanish "aqui, aca, alli, alla", meaning "right here, here, there, over there," describes his work. Here, there, everywhere. Rather than having a signature or trademark, his work is linked conceptually. The concepts are often generated by life style events. For example, in jest, the author of a survival book on fire making said, as a last resort, if no matches, use a magnifying lens, if no lens, make one out of ice. So, Paul Kos did!
When Super Bowl Sunday's halftime commercials started influencing his video students with their 1,000 edits a minute pace, Kos stacked 27 video monitors, 9 high and 3 wide, to comprise a contemplative, architectural, 27 channel, stained glass window, CHARTRES BLEU, with no edits and time slowed down.
Kos opts for, but never expects, partly cloudy becoming mostly sunny.