Jan Tichy
Light Shop
January 22 – February 23, 2020
Jan Tichy’s new works – photograms, neon sculptures, light installations, and video with sound – connect the imminent disappearance of the Bowery Lighting District with broader ‘politics of light’, a term the artist uses to describe the commodification of light and socioeconomic conditions that cause inequality, rapid urban development, and light pollution.
Light Shop focuses on collection of light – an ephemeral, fleeting phenomenon – and its transformation into tangible form. The camera Tichy chose to make the photo-based works in the exhibition uses a manually operated shutter, underscoring the physicality of light collection.
The exhibition is in dialogue with the landmark 1937 project Changing New York by Berenice Abbott, who photographed the city, the Bowery, and explored the formal aspects of the materialization of light through cylinders, spirals, globes, radio tubes, and electrostatic generators in Documenting Science. Both books can be viewed at the gallery’s reception.
Bowery Prints is a suite of photograms made with glass objects the artist purchased from the last lighting stores that remain on the Bowery, and with the light the artist collected when photographing the shops’ interiors. Throughout the gallery, a series of neon sculptures bent and blown by the artist respond to light fixtures sold in the nearby shops.
In the back room of the gallery, Installation no.38 (lightshop), explores relationships among digital, analog, and natural light systems and invokes the social implications of what is visible and what is left unseen due to a lack of access to light. The installation incorporates a video of sunlight collected from the storefront window of the gallery and transported into its darkest corner.
The exhibition continues in the downstairs media room with Bowery Raw, a two-channel video installation composed of 97 photographs (the same as the number of photographs in Changing New York) and serves as a collective portrait of the disappearing Lighting District. The photos are made audible by translating the underlying RAW image files into sound – another seemingly intangible medium with lasting effects on the body.
Works
Exhibition Programming
Opening Reception • January 22, 2020
Jan Tichy is a contemporary artist and educator. Working at the intersection of video, sculpture, architecture, and photography, his conceptual work is socially and politically engaged.
Born in Prague in 1974, Tichy studied art in Israel before earning his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he is now Professor at the Departments of Photography and Art & Technology/Sound Practices. Tichy has had solo exhibitions at the MCA Chicago; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; CCA Tel Aviv; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Santa Barbara Museum of Art and Chicago Cultural Center among others.
His works are included in public collections of MoMA in New York and Israel Museum in Jerusalem among others. His large public art projects engage communities and offer platforms to share.
In 2011 Project Cabrini Green illuminated with spoken word the last high rise building of the Cabrini Green housing projects in Chicago and Beyond Streaming: a sound mural for Flint at the Broad Museum in Michigan in 2017 brought teens from Flint and Lansing to share their experience of the ongoing water crisis. In 2018 Tichy was one of the inaugural artists for Art on the MART. In 2019 he co-edited and curated Ascendants: the Bauhaus Handprints collected by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy published by IIT Press.
His 2020 yearlong project Remote Pyramids in Dallas, TX brought together local Latinx teenagers with refugee teens to critically and creatively address issues of migration. In 2023, within the framework of Chicago Architecture Biennale, Tichy reconstructed the whitewashed mural All Of Mankind by William Walker on the façade of Joffrey Ballet Chicago. Most recently Tichy co-curated the first major retrospective of Lucia Moholy at Kunsthalle Prague.