Jan Tichy “Installations” at Richard Gray Gallery

It’s rare that an economic downturn has an “upside” but it’s clear that without it Jan Tichy’s show “Installations” for Richard Gray Gallery would not have been possible. Mr. Tichy’s video installations are literally embedded in the vacant offices and abandoned conference rooms of an entire floor in the Hancock Building. Stepping off of an elevator into an empty and dimly lit corporate office is already an evocative enough experience on its own and heightened only by what Mr. Tichy’s videos do with the dark. Frequently the only light source available, Mr. Tichy’s projected works are predominantly black and white videos that illuminate topographical paper forms on the walls or the floors. The sculpted paper and the videos interact, spot lighting, casting shadows, filling up or revealing separate parts. “Installation No. 8 (Hancock)” washes light onto and off of a crooked architectural nook created by the building itself. The most evocative piece, “Installation No. 4 (Towers)” sat alone in a large room. Two paper radar towers were lit from above by a projection that slowly ebbed and flowed between a cold crisp brightness and a deep, twilight darkness. The brightness cast stark shadows from the towers and the curvature of the radar dome split the projected pixels apart. The transition between the two states begins as a sliver of light that grows progressively longer and wider to bathe the floor in a bright white rectangle.

Some other works sit awkwardly in the mix, like Recess, a long shot of a park playground during the day, seemingly unrelated to the light referenced in the rest of the work. Even “Bats”, a dueling pair of slide projectors showing flash photos of urban bats in mid-flight, relates back to Mr. Tichy’s more formal installations. Their eyes glow in the night sky the flash showing their bone structure through their translucent wings. Caught naked, like spectres of the night mistakenly revealed, the bats are symbols of the Otherness of the dark that Mr. Tichy plays with elsewhere. The natural impetus driving his work with light is clearly seen in a series called ‘”Pictures”. Displayed on tiny LCD screens about the size of a family photo the vignettes feature banal nighttime arrangements of light. A streetlamp reflecting in a puddle of water, windows in a building across the street or a searchlight roaming the sky are like videoic observational drawings. Despite being more like studies for larger works they still they hold a quiet understated beauty in themselves. For a medium that is as technological as video, Mr. Tichy has found in the play of material and light, representation and digital information, the intoxicating charm of a darkened cinema and the epiphanic glow of the projector.