JAMES KAUM

Fear. That fundamental emotion. And, at its core, a driver and motivation for every personal experience. Individually, we speak of this singularly: fear. Collectively, save for perhaps mass hysteria, a more appropriate term, a state, a description, would be fear-ism. Here, action becomes both agency and evolution, both self-preservation and self-awareness. There is, of course, a suggestion that the culture, the organization, the worldview, the collective psychology (or psychosis, perhaps), that undergirds fear is … death. Fear of disappearance; of omission; of absence; of annihilation. Fear — sublimated before re-emerging as cognitive dissonance, antithesis of bland optimism in the face of the inevitable nothingness, harbinger of the unattainable — becomes a crucible into some choose to pour their souls.

Yet against fear’s inevitable nihilism, the persistent belief in freedom remains. On the edge of destruction, talks of peace; in the face of invisibility, the belief in eternity. Against backdrops of paranoia, war, oppression, surveillance, and conspiracy, fear and freedom collide to create an abiding belief: potential.

And, with the belief that something more is possible, we experience the works of James Kaum. Steeped in the dark confines of psyche and self, Kaum’s works strive to synthesize dichotomies, and to redefine the limits of materiality. TNT; linseed oil; wood; scotch tape; wax; oil paint, glass, solar panels; LEDs. Kaum sets the natural order against controlled destruction, much as he sets the individual against the interconnected. Add in sex, violence, sensuality, and blood, and you may just begin to descend into Kaum’s visual world. And, perhaps, live eternally.