JAN TICHY: INSTALLATIONS
October 9, 2009 – January 9, 2010

Richard Gray Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent work by Jan Tichy, presented in a temporary project space one floor below the Chicago gallery in the famed Skidmore, Owings & Merrill-designed John Hancock Center. Jan Tichy: Installations consists of nine works made over the past three years and is the artist's largest solo show to date.

Jan Tichy works at the intersection of video, sculpture, architecture, and photography; many of his works combine these elements. In "Installation No. 4 (Towers)", a nuanced digital video is projected from overhead onto dual "towers": two handmade paper sculptures standing three feet tall. The animated video projection seems to call the towers to action in different ways, at times implicating them in naturalistic landscapes. The architecture of the towers is familiar, though a precise referent goes purposely unnamed.

Also on view is a new work the artist filmed this summer of children at play on a school playground in Gary, Indiana. "Recess" is a ten-minute single channel HD video projection, shot continuously from a single bird's-eye view. The volume of sub-narratives contained within "Recess" forces the viewer to necessarily shift back and forth, and yet the overall composition of children swarming becomes abstract, belying the many vignettes of innocence, antagonism, rough play and wild energy.

A highlight of the exhibition is a site-specific video-light installation the artist created while working in the exhibition space over the past three months. The work directly responds to the interior architecture of the building, employing part of the famous X-shaped beam as a sculptural element. Among the other works included is "100 RAW", a work in which raw photography files are translated for both their image and sound content, and then recombined as video, resulting in the sensation that you are hearing what you are seeing.

Born in Prague in 1974, Jan Tichy moved to Israel in the mid 1990s. After studying at Bezalel Academy of Art, in 2007 he moved to Chicago, where he earned an MFA from the School of the Art Institute earlier this year. He has had one-person exhibitions at the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and, in the fall of 2010, he will have a solo show at the Center for Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv. Over the past two years his work has been included in exhibitions at public institutions in Barcelona, Berlin, Frankfurt, Jerusalem, Paris, Prague, Stockholm, Tel Aviv, Venice, and Washington, D.C.