The serene sound of rushing water opens to images of the dawn over the spectacular Gulf of Alaska: mist rising from the water, snow capped peaks, a bald eagle soaring through the air. This is the beginning of Pawel Wojtasik’s most recent video, The Aquarium, presented in his solo exhibition at the Alona Kagan Gallery in New York.

In the past three years Wojtasik’s video work has received well-deserved attention in numerous exhibitions, including Greater New York 2005 at PS1, as well as others in New York, Antwerp, Paris, and Madrid. His work is shot from the point of view of an impartial observer and focuses on marginalized aspects of society. This critical distancing allows him to address essential philosophic binary oppositional forces: life and death, good and evil, beauty and ugliness. These themes are presented with clarity in this recent work, The Aquarium, where powerful and evocative images are shown of captive walruses, sea lions and beluga whales, as well as in his 2003 Dark Sun Squeeze where human excrement at a waste treatment facility is presented as rich sparkling prima materia.

Wojtasik was born in Poland where he lived until the age of 16. He moved first to Tunisia, where he lived for three years before immigrating to the United States. This experience of growing-up in a communist country, living in an Islamic society, then adapting to a new life in New York, shaped his politics and social consciousness. When he began making art seriously, however, he avoided any social critique. Instead he sought a universal and transcendent form for his expression. Yet, it was this social dimension that continued to drive him in search of the right form for his work.

For years Wojtasik worked as a painter focusing on a reductive kind of biomorphic abstraction. Then in 2000, while in Verona, Italy, he stumbled on the exhibition “Kasimir Malevich and the Sacred Russian Icons” and he had a shocking epiphany. One of the paintings in the show was Malevich’s 1913 Black Cross and upon seeing this work Wojtasik realized that this was the painting that he always wanted to make. At this point he began to consider other ways of making art. He borrowed a video camera and started experimenting.

Simultaneously with his transformation from painting to video Wojtasik became deeply involved with Buddhist practice. He spent many months in retreat at Dai Bosatsu Zendo, a monastery in upstate New York. He describes this experience, which is focused on the personal act of meditation, as a process of letting go of the cage of the self, the ego, and realizing it is a construct with nothing real about it. This process of focusing inward, and seeing the unsubstantiality of the ego, paradoxically allowed him to open up to the world. This in turn made him realize his responsibility toward society.

Dark Sun Squeeze, filmed at a waste treatment facility in Connecticut, is the most fully realized work in a series of videos that includes sites as disparate as a supermarket, a junkyard and a garbage transfer station. It is Wojtasik’s Buddhist meditation. His camera becomes a detached eye watching human excrement as it pools, bubbles, flows and sparkles in the sun. Visually it is hypnotic and seductive, yet simultaneously putrid and repulsive.

As a work of art it approaches the complex dialectic of the second century Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna, who founded the Middle Path School (Madhyamika). According to Nagarjuna, a proposition neither is, nor is it not; also, it’s inaccurate to say that it both is and is not, as well as to claim that it neither is nor is not. By clearing the field of all conceptual frameworks he claimed that it is possible to see reality clearly and face it directly. This dialectic can be used as a locus with which to understand Wojtasik’s point of view. As he stands staring at this modern machine made to process human waste he is absorbed within it and his ego vanishes; his perception is clear and precise. The viewer is left to ponder the sublime experience of this endless fecal matter in all its possible meanings.

Extending from the formal structure of Dark Sun Squeeze is Wojtasik’s longer, complex, and layered work, The Aquarium, which unlike any of his previous works was produced entirely using High Definition video. It contrasts footage shot at the Alaska SeaLife Center and the Mystic and New York Aquariums with footage of the spectacular mountains, shoreline, and tundra of the Gulf of Alaska. It is a poetic elucidation of the paradoxical experience of humankind’s effect on the natural world. Of specific importance is that the SeaLife Center, which opened in 1998, was funded largely by the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Settlement Fund. Ironically, it now houses some animal species, like the Steller sea lion, that vanished from the Alaskan ecosystem as a result of the spill.

Wojtasik was inspired by Ginger Strand’s essay, “Why Look at Fish?,” which discusses the aquarium culture and how it’s become an ersatz experience of ocean life. Wojtasik complicates this issue by including the aquarium visitors in many of his shots as if he is saying to anyone watching that not only are they watching the animals, they are watching other people who are also prisoners in their own kind of captivity.

The soundtrack by Tim Partridge is a woven fabric of ambient sounds: submarine or SOS like electronic sounds, an electronic drone and an unaffected female voiceover by Kyle DeCamp reciting lists written by Strand specifically for this piece, including the current status of the world’s coral reefs, threatened or endangered aquatic animals in the US, and names of Beluga whales in captivity. All four of these elements become a serene and haunting counterpart to the pleasure and amazement of watching the animals swim, roll, twist and even stop and look through the glass with what feels like human expression. There is the sense of a real connection with these animals until one shocking sequence where a walrus slams its body into the glass with tremendous force making it abundantly clear that it is captive and on display for our amusement.

Wojtasik by his own definition seeks four dimensions in a work of art—the social, the psychological, the universal and the sublime. His work has been inspired by the great abstract painters of the twentieth century, like Malevich and Barnett Newman, as well as by the Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. But now it is Tarkovsky who leads the way with his example of presenting reality, or even a dream, just as it is with extreme clarity and precision.