Tom Kotik

The artist Tom Kotik takes silence as the subject of his sculptural works, creating non-functional replicas of amplifiers and speakers that aestheticize the delivery of sound without actually making any. His 2004 sculpture Rational Impulse takes this one step further, placing one soundproof box within another and then within another, with the smallest box containing a speaker that, when the viewer opens the box, emits a loud blast of music from Kotik's band, Mighty High. His works explore the idea of true silence as being idealized—how, even in a parabolic chamber, the sound of our bodily systems persists. Silence, Kotik shows, is not the absence of noise, but the concealment of it.

Kotik's minimalistic, participatory works have been exhibited internationally at such institutions as the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona (2010), the Bronx Museum (2005), SculptureCenter (2004), and the Angel Orensanz Foundation (2002).