Jan Tichy - All Monsters - MOCAD
This was my first experience with Mike Kelly’s Mobile Homestead, and Jan Tichy for that matter. I went into this exhibition without knowing much about it at all, I think a very appropriate way to approach any piece of art. I wanted to have this introduction to the space and the artist to be entirely dependent on the formal qualities.
Overtaking the entirety of the gallery, Jan Tichy creates an environment in which the audience becomes highly aware of space and timelines. As you enter the gallery, you feel as though you’re walking into a typical suburban ranch style home. Quickly you question if you’ve missed the entrance, perhaps you’ve slipped between the walls instead, stuck in-between the homely and familiar and its dark underbelly. It’s as if you’re behind the facade of an experience or looking into a cross-section of reality. The droning of electrical currents and HVAC are paired with low-fi poetic speech in a space that pulses and ungulates with bleeding light from the various projections and the gallery’s own exit sign illuminating and emphasizing the dimensionality of the space. Copper pipes snake through the space, adding to the themes of “infrastructure” and “building”, lit only in fleeting moments.
This exhibition takes time to really experience and navigate, projections change and you catch these really nice moments in which you feel as if you have just happened to be in the right place at the right time to see which was highly appreciated. It’s fairly understated, you really have to just wonder through the rooms and notice. This added to some sort of feeling of hostility or disconnect, I nearly tripped on pipes in dark rooms and I worry I actually missed some portion of the show. Frustrating, but also added to the aura.
My issue with exhibitions that have such a strong emphasis on the “experience” is that there’s the possibility for the show to be carried by the very fact that it’s an experience, rather than its conceptual or theoretical points. It feels very interesting and different when you consider how so much of art doesn’t encompass all your senses, so naturally it makes an impression. Now whether Jan Tichy is making good use of the “experiential” to convey ideas of structure, space and time or rather just as a cop out tactic could be debated. Either way, a very nice show and highly recommend visiting.
Amman Khan - Thesis
It would be wrong to conclude Amman Khan’s Thesis to be about the material in any traditional sense. This continuation of minimalist found object sculpture caught in a trans-dimensional leap is a group of object oriented photographs which show a delicate attunement toward a magical reality where objects and their states of being tessellate. Documentary in nature, Amman’s work captures objects in relation to others and themselves, objects in reality warping transformations.
A square of highly processed lumber centered in a moss ridden and weathered field of the same material, their differences are obvious. The darker natural wood jumps between background and foreground, as if its precise and bleached counterpart is punching through its own past, only to be grounded once again in our minds through its cast shadow. Construction, human intervention on our world and the spiritual implications of effecting and shaping the clay of our Earth are laid bare and scrutinized under a microscope. The result is uncomfortable, but aesthetically sublime.
The strongest works in this group are those which tend to stray slightly from a strictly material play of transformation, and rather focus on the spiritual or even magical aspect of process. It’s in “music sheet” and “circuit board” where Amman is highlighting not the physical transformation of things, but our very understanding of transformation. Temporal and objective are paired with the abstract and musical, treating the objects in the photos as artifacts of human reason and thought—acting as a bridge to Amman’s conclusion: “prism” and “black hole”.
These are where the abilities of the camera are taken to its fullest extent by the artist in order to distort, but not to confuse, but rather to lay bare once again. Having the least to do with the material, human intervention or our understanding of the process, purely the intangible and spiritual aspects of change are exhibited through beautifully composed sermons, tastefully playing with religious iconography from colored streaming light akin to heavenly rays pouring in from cathedral windows to the intertwined foliage of its very walls. The viewer is forced to confront the existence of a higher being as we stare into the void, left questioning if our actions to this world are all part of a cosmic play or rather left to the forces of chaos and godless hedonism.
