KPAS ARCHIVE 2018–2024
This catalogue presents a curated archive of Kalman Pool’s inflatable ecosystems, speculative hybrids, and invented symbolic languages from 2018 to 2024. It traces the evolution of Pool’s interdisciplinary practice across sculpture, VR, painting, and ceramics — where synthetic lifeforms defy biological categories, and inflatable bodies pulse with poetic ambiguity.
The works selected span from monumental inflatable creatures to experimental ceramics and phygital pictographic systems. Born in virtual space and stitched into physical reality, these creations inhabit a world that is at once ancient and futuristic, grotesque and tender, absurd and sacred. Within this archive, viewers encounter not just artworks, but entire systems of alternate biology and language — surreal taxonomies that suggest new forms of co-existence and embodiment.
“As Kalman breathes life into his expansive collection of hybrid menagerie, each inflatable offering contains with it a duplicitous and highly contradictory set of registers. In an act of fluid refusal and a stealthy occupying of the liminal space of contra-taxonomies, the artist invites us to embark on a journey of discovery through a series of encounters with uncanny mutations, porous binaries, and otherwise worldly ecologies.”
— Rachel Falconer, Curator & Writer