"How to Float Above the Psychic Stampede and Other Traditional Remedies"
How to Float Above the Psychic Stampede and Other Traditional Remedies
A family of a lumber stud creatures face a digital screen, mesmerized by the sight of their own electronic reflection. Jungle tree frogs call out over a rave bass beat sending ripples over the surface of a pond. The chorus of nearly extinct voices echoes in a space portentously bracketed by monolithic satellite dishes. The metallic mesh bowl of each dish is woven with tiers of silky thread in mandala-like patterns; a compulsively linear attempt to record a long lost signal, webs of dreams spun within bleakly indifferent communication devices.
It's official. On a terminally ill planet, in the face of irreversible damage and in the absence of any larger vision that could suggest the possibility of either social justice or common good, a wave of panic has begun to mount. Shedding a thin layer of civility, an inadmissible, secretly harbored nihilism raises its head. The specter of a crawling, slow-motion apocalypse takes on tangible form. Irresolvable global resource conflicts cast long shadows over contemporary societies precipitating the long suppressed realization that an ultimate war between individual beings has erupted. Street-corner doomsayers have their day. Courtesy of the gratification industry, individual links and larger social fabrics are shredded under a pressure of freshly nurtured desires. Mortal fear and savage hostilities ripple through metropolitan crowds. The psychic stampede has begun!
Will an omphalos carved into a stone, a center of gravity that hopes to hold, summon a grounding force?
Jan Baracz is a Polish artist who lives and works in New York. He is a graduate of NYU, Bard College and the Whitney Independent Study program and has been the recipient of awards from the Asian Cultural Council, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, Artists Space and the Kosciusko Foundation, among others. His work has been exhibited extensively in New York and internationally at venues including Art Unlimited at Art Basel, the Sculpture Center and the Center for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, Poland. His most recent solo exhibition was "Reality Cinema/LIVE VIDEO", a socio-cinematic installation that premiered at Art in General in 2008 for which he built a theatre that screened live images from the street outside. His photography has appeared in The Paris Review, American Letters & Commentary and Jane magazine. This is his first solo exhibition with Stephan Stoyanov Gallery.
Stephan Stoyanov Gallery
29 Orchard St. Between Canal and Hester.
New York, NY 10002
212 343 4240
October 17th - November 14th, 2010
Gallery hours;
Wed.-Sat.11:00 am - 6:00 pm; Sundays noon until 6:00 pm
http://www.baracz.com/
http://www.baracz.com/gallery/
http://www.baracz.com/
http://www.baracz.com/gallery/
Contact: baracz@gmail.com
A few thoughts on the objects in the exhibition by Jan Baracz
A few thoughts on the objects in the exhibition by Jan Baracz
A jarring architectural menace, satellite dishes can be found on facades of buildings all over the globe. Impossible to conceal, they are the track marks of our dependency on mass media. These dishes, found on skyscrapers and jungle huts, rely on sophisticated data transmission technology which very few of their users understand. They perfectly alienate the process from the result. And yet paradoxically, these ominous devices set up to receive hard data serve to weave people's most intimate dreams, hopes and fantasies. They are used to receive religious channels, soap operas and pornography. Here these communication monsters are linked to a wholly antithetical ancient cosmological model, a mandala-like dream catcher based on linearly inspired Pythagorean geometry, which held the long lost promise of mathematical and musical harmony between heaven and earth.
A nuclear family of a standard 2"X4" lumber stud creatures face a digital screen, mesmerized by the sight of their own electronic reflection. Active power strips glow on their wooden stud bodies, each plugged into another one in an intractable tangle of moronic inter-dependency on power and electronic communication. Alike the participants of the so-called social media, self-satisfied with their illusion of communal activity they could be singing; "We are the World..."
The navel / belly button / omphalos has a special place in every mythology. For the Greeks it was the place where Zeus' two eagles met marking the navel of the world, for the Jews it is the navel of the diaspora: Jerusalem. It is the center of a beneficial gravity field ( the belly ), the potential source of a grounding force that counteracts the centrifugal forces of our civilizational madness. It is a magic object which resonates peace and sanity, a natural artifact, a bodily mark and a trace of a physically severed ancestral connection -- a soft spot here made mysteriously hard.
"Come with me" is a sculptural travelogue. A recording of tree frogs in a tropical jungle, vocally competing with a techno party bass beat, is channeled through a subwoofer over a water surface and gives the sound the physical form of a concentric ripple. The frogs sculpt waves here.
A nuclear family of a standard 2"X4" lumber stud creatures face a digital screen, mesmerized by the sight of their own electronic reflection. Active power strips glow on their wooden stud bodies, each plugged into another one in an intractable tangle of moronic inter-dependency on power and electronic communication. Alike the participants of the so-called social media, self-satisfied with their illusion of communal activity they could be singing; "We are the World..."
The navel / belly button / omphalos has a special place in every mythology. For the Greeks it was the place where Zeus' two eagles met marking the navel of the world, for the Jews it is the navel of the diaspora: Jerusalem. It is the center of a beneficial gravity field ( the belly ), the potential source of a grounding force that counteracts the centrifugal forces of our civilizational madness. It is a magic object which resonates peace and sanity, a natural artifact, a bodily mark and a trace of a physically severed ancestral connection -- a soft spot here made mysteriously hard.
"Come with me" is a sculptural travelogue. A recording of tree frogs in a tropical jungle, vocally competing with a techno party bass beat, is channeled through a subwoofer over a water surface and gives the sound the physical form of a concentric ripple. The frogs sculpt waves here.
posted by Jan Baracz @ 10:44 AM
