Jan Tichy. Long Lines

About

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.