NYAB Event - Jan Tichy “Long Lines”

Jan Tichy “Long Lines”

Fridman Gallery

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Fridman Gallery presents Long Lines, Jan Tichy’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.

Tichy’s signature works use video projection as a source of time-based light to explore space. Juxtaposing light and movement, Tichy investigates both the formal, minimalist structures of spatial relationships, and the socio-political implications of the seen and unseen. We stand entranced in meditative contemplation of objects, time and space.

In a new site-specific Installation no. 27, 2016, Tichy activates the gallery space with a time-based projection, using the gallery’s two columns as pivotal elements. The light moves onto a series of embossed prints emerging from darkness and falling back into it, the embossment carving shadows on the black paper. One of the prints is of the AT&T Long Lines Building, a 550-foot tall windowless skyscraper located several blocks from the gallery, that houses telephone exchanges and data centers. The reference draws long lines of thought between the sealed white space lit inside and the secured impenetrable structure that maneuvers and controls our perception in invisible ways.

Installation no. 7, 2009 is a video projection on porcelain objects expanding onto three planes from a corner of the gallery. The lit porcelain domes map US nuclear waste storage facilities, highlighting the concealed, while the vertical light movement embodies radioactive leakage contaminating the underground.

Installation No. 20 (walls), 2014 explores the long narrow architectural space behind the drywall of the gallery’s white cube, a hidden space normally used for temporary art storage. The 12-minute video loop, which fluctuates between full darkness and light, culminating in a sunrise-like grand finale, invites viewers to experience off-limits areas and to imagine what is happening behind the scenes.

In a gallery window, facing the street, a five-foot wide white neon circle, New York Nature (after Nauman), 2016 responds to the pulse of the city via a real-time link to the New York Police Department scanner based in the 1st, 5th and 7th precincts. The light turns on and off each time the dispatcher connects and disconnects radio transmissions with patrolling officers. The title refers to the alternating neon by the American artist Bruce Nauman, Human Nature/Life Death (1983), installed in a street-facing window at the Chicago Cultural Center in the 1990s. The work is simultaneously an abstract object signifying the cycle of time and a visceral tool connecting us to the incessant city.

Jan Tichy (Czech, b. 1974), was born in Prague and studied in Israel before earning his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he is now Assistant Professor at the Department of Photography. Tichy has had solo exhibitions at the MCA Chicago; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago; CCA Tel Aviv; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; No Longer Empty, NY; and Chicago Cultural Center; among others. Over the past two years, Tichy has been working on a long-term community project in Gary, Indiana. In November 2016, he will open a solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Osnabrueck in Germany.

Tichy’s work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Magasin 3 Stockholm Kunsthall; Museum of Applied Arts, Frankfurt; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; and Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; among others.