JAN BARACZ
BIOGRAPHY
Jan Baracz was born in Warsaw, Poland and moved to New York city in 1981. His projects include Sand Box 1.0 at the Contemporary Art Center, Warsaw, Poland, Life is Short exhibited at Art Basel, Switzerland in 2002 and The Ghost at ArtMbassy Gallery, in Berlin, Germany in 2006. Baracz's sequential photographic projection Eyebeads by Words Held Fast premiered in New York in 2006. In 2008, he produced the cinematic installation Reality Cinema/LIVE VIDEO at Art in General in New York, and in 2012 he completed the first installment of the media/sculptural project How to Float Above the Psychic Stampede and Other Traditional Remedies at the Stefan Stoyanov Gallery on New York’s Lower East Side. Baracz's installation On the Nature of Dust Deposits, Minerva Owl Flight Patterns, and Other Commonly Overlooked Events had been on view at Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art in Peekskill, New York between 2017 and 2019. In 2022 Konnotation Press published his photography book, Eyebeads by Words Held Fast. His recent solo exhibition Mutiny’s Darling (2023) at Peninsula Gallery in New York was reviewed by Andrew Woolbright for the Brooklyn Rail. He has received grants and awards from Art Matters, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Asian Cultural Council, Edward F. Albee Foundation, and the Kosciuszko Foundation among others. Baracz's photography has appeared in Paris Review, American Letters & Commentary, and numerous other periodicals.
STATEMENT
Experiential element is central to my work. An encounter with a presence that affects a change within us is akin to magic. We undergo a minute transformation. My work has evolved from tracing physical patterns to examining perceptions and from probing perceptual tendencies to facilitating an experience of perceptual change. An experience, which is in some way revealing and has transformative potential, is worth sharing. Sharing an experience is not simply an act of dissemination. An experience, which is made available to others, becomes an event that in turn transforms the initial experience itself, allowing it to grow through active participation and acquire unexpected forms.
The broader public context in which an artwork lives the more complex a nexus it forms. A net of shifted perceptions, receptions, exchanges and dialogues that an event generates becomes the “art object”.An instrument, which facilitates the experience, becomes a physical catalyst around which a meeting ground forms. This meeting ground, which exists largely in psychological and social dimensions is a communal space generated by a shared experience. I can best describe my current constructions as instruments that provide access to a variety of perceptual patterns while unhinging identification mechanisms. Public space as circumscribed by architectural decisions is a site where the interplay of the social and the individual allow for an active engagement and investigations of such devices. Conventions that often denominate art, frames, and pedestals are curiously pervasive. They are the signposts that exclaim: “OH, LOOK!” Similarly, platforms, with their notion of physical and metaphorical elevation are a tool that allows for the isolation of a subject and provides a vertical perspective. When these conventional devices are free of their burdensome subjects, they become playful objects with almost unlimited potential. The site becomes a multi-contextual, and free for all, perceptual vehicle. My recent work employs sculpture, electronic media and installation to generate situations (rather than self-important objects) which through analogy (rather than metaphor) become tools of access to forms and underlying patterns, providing a variant angle of access to what is taken for granted and habitually accepted. The subject, therefore, is the evoked relations rather than the involved forms. While not conveying messages per se, by undressing larger culturally determined structures that condition our ways of seeing and interpreting, my constructions aim at "trapping" the viewer in an experience where a construct of oneself is being challenged.
In short, I explore that quiet drama of perceptual shift that occurs when what we look at becomes something very different from its initial appearance. We ask, how could we have seen something else before? Am I a different person from the one who looked at it before? Possibly. The change of mind with its romantic and Utopian potential is both the subject and object of my most recent work.
ROOM 505
Title: “LIFE IS SHORT”, Swing seat, manila rope. 42’ high swing. 2002
With the motion of a pendulum, a swing traverses the interior of a space, testing its cubic capacity and, what is more, its kinetic potential. An archetypal toy, like a fountain or a kaleidoscope, a swing
exploits the physical phenomenon of free motion through space. The spectacular tactile experience it provides relies on the physical surroundings in which the flight takes place. A basic tool for learning about gravity and motion, a swing is where children run to first in a playground. The adults secretly indulge in its pleasures during rare moments of romantic rupture. A swing releases the trapeze artist in all of us.
Title: “ON THE NATURE OF DUST DEPOSITS, MINERVA OWL FLIGHT PATTERNS AND OTHER COMMONLY OVERLOOKED EVENTS”, Wood, canvas, paint, hardware, 22’ X 18’ X 9’, 2015 - 2016
Installation at Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art in Peekskill, New York. A mound of demonstration signs, a stack of banners and flags leaning against a blank wall. Their messages whitewashed and obscured, coated in dust. Who left them here? What was their cause? Pro or Against? For Change or for Status Quo? Have they fulfilled their task? Do these makeshift objects still have the power to provoke? Can these vessels of urgency be emptied of their meaning? If so, what is left? Can they be used again? Used against their original purpose? Nameless soldiers, made to last for a moment of engaged fervor. Their lives reduced to their purpose. Fleeting displays that know no love for their labor. Do these disposable objects mirror our expendable politics? Can their skeletal volume attest to the agency of their cause? Can they still spark memories, projections, desires? Can they be liberated from the burden of messages and attain dignity of their own? Are they allowed a life beyond their duty?
Title: “THIRST”, Polyethylene Poland Spring water containers, steel fencing. 12’ X 12’ X 10', 1999
In 1998 the retail price of bottled water exceeded the price of gasoline. This natural resource has become the most coveted commodity. Installation on the parking lot on the South West corner of Wooster Street and Grand Street in Soho, New York city. 1,680 gallons of drinking water in 6-gallon containers.