Click on the thumbnails for full images
Images:
Top banner: SubLimeLight Installation – Phosphorescent Phase, 2001, mixed media
SubLimeLight Installation [detail] – Laser Phase
R@bust_E/Co.Law-Gee Installation, 2002, mixed media
Oxygen Monitor #4, 1993, 65”x101”, mixed media
The Year of Pain and Pleasure, 1987, 8’5”x18’4”, acrylic on linen
The Year of the Grand Inquisitor, 1985, 9’6”x15’4”, acrylic on linen
The Year of the Self and the Not-Self, 1989, 9’5”x13’11”, acrylic on linen
The Year of Apples Suns Mirrors and Electricities, 1989, 9’6”x14’1”, acrylic on linen
Liquid Light I, 1990, 80”x128”, acrylic on linen
Turquoise Honey River, 1990, 80”x128”, acrylic on linen
About the artist:
Alex Shalom Kohav is a visual artist whose lifelong oeuvre ranges from two- and three-dimensional works to installations, and from paintings and what he has characterized as “very wired” technology and machinery-based works to “observational” as well as “participatory” immersive environments. (In the latter, audience members become part of the installations they visit.) His pioneering use of oscillating electrical lights in some of his works has the potential to produce meditative mind states and mild transformative alterations of consciousness.
Kohav authored “The New Age Art Manifesto” during his earlier painterly period and later wrote “The New Edge Manifesto,” which accompanied his turn to technology-infused works and room-sized installations. His entire artistic work has been surveyed in Ori Z. Soltes’s book Ontogeny of Light ~ Apples, Suns, Mirrors, Electricities – Limitless Light, Oscillating Silences, Immersive Realms: The Art of Alex Shalom Kohav (Canal Street Studios, 2020).
Having studied art at the Art Students League of New York in late 1970s and then in Paris in the early 1980s, he had his first studio in East Hampton, New York, where he produced paintings in numerous series, bearing titles such as Limitless Light series, Liquid Light, and Honey Rivers, as well as The Time Being, or The Year of . . . , a cycle of large-scale paintings.
Based in Boulder, Colorado, since 1998, Kohav pursued a PhD in interdisciplinary studies (with emphases in consciousness studies and religious studies) concurrently with his artistic work. His 2011 dissertation presents the findings on the First Temple period of ancient Israel and the Temple priesthood, establishing the groundwork for his discovery of a priestly mystical-initiatory system (disclosed, in a literary-figurative manner, in the Torah, or Pentateuch). This research—engaging close to a dozen modern academic disciplines—has recently been published as Early Israel: Cultic Praxis, God, and the Sôd Hypothesis (Routledge, 2023).
Teaching since 2011 in the Department of Philosophy, Metropolitan State University of Denver, and specializing in philosophy (philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and epistemology), he is currently engaged in articulating his own philosophical system and an approach to a vision that probes the extent and limits of the worlds accessible to human beings.
Select Publications:
PARADOXES IN GOD’S GARDEN: Jewish Philosophy and the Edenic Narrative (Lexington Books, 2025): https://shorturl.at/xMavr
EARLY ISRAEL: Cultic Praxis, God, and the Sôd Hypothesis (Routledge, 2023): http://bitly.ws/xvY4
MYSTICISM AND EXPERIENCE (Lexington Books, 2020): https://urlzs.com/zFhtn
MYSTICISM AND MEANING (Three Pines Press/University of Hawaii, 2019): https://amzn.to/2KKuvrI
THE SôD HYPOTHESIS (MaKoM Publications, 2013): https://shorturl.at/AQkyi
[Ori Z. Soltes] ONTOGENY OF LIGHT: THE ART OF A.S. KOHAV (Canal Street Studios, 2020): https://amzn.to/2WlVAa7
VIDEO INTERVIEWS:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bt9i_mXmYPI&t=2499s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwNn5o4Y-nA&t=4624s
alex.s.kohav@comcast.net
