Jan Baracz: twilight mechanics
January 23 - March 7, 2025
Curated by Izabela Gola
Upcoming Public Event:
music for alligators
Thursday, February 20, 6 PM at 49 Monroe Street
“twilight mechanics” *
Act II.
Scene I.
SAM ‑ pale, gaunt, ragged, hawklike-featured old man.
FEROX ‑ young, slinky, sylphlike human-animal hybrid.
ALEXA – an electronic device.
WORD** ‑ an invisible and notably absent (perhaps lost?) metonym for language.
Room at night, Sam is lying on a disheveled bed in a semi-dark room. A passing train rattles the room. Drones or helicopters vibrate in the distance. Explosions are heard in the background (Is it bombs or fireworks?).
SAM
What kind of night is it? Lights flashing everywhere? What makes night night if not darkness? Word, what happened to your containing act? Have you severed yourself from my days? What is this empty, dry, tongue-shaped shell. In fact, where are you?
Ambulance sirens and car horns join the “orchestra”.
ALEXA (blue halo pulsing around its top)
Can you repeat your question?
Enter FEROX
The language has come to betray us.
ALEXA (blue halo blinking)
Can you try to re-phrase it?
SAM
I dreamt that we got out. And past the damned radius I saw the other shore.
FEROX
All around, the rim flares up untrodden. The soil is aflame, not a rat can escape
ALEXA (blue halo blinking)
Would you like me to play music? Wagner or Schoenberg?
SAM
(to Ferox) Unplug her.
FEROX
And dreams have left us to march along the troops, across the raging waters.
SAM
On, do you remember on? What was on? I can’t recall it. How can one go without on? Is on still even on?
The room is darkening. The cacophony outside is gradually subsiding with hiccups and whimpers.
ALEXA (blue halo blinking)
There seems to be an outage. Please restart your Echo device and try again.
FEROX
The night is here. Let charcoal and graphite blindly render her velvety hollow.
SAM
And Word? Can Word trace its way back?
* In December 1914, after the onset of World War I, the publisher John Lane had asked Ford Madox Ford to change the title of his then upcoming novel The Saddest Story. In the response letter to Lane, Ford suggested (sarcastically) The Good Soldier. To the author's horror the novel soon appeared in print under the that title.
** Not to be mistaken for the Biblical God.
Jan Baracz: twilight mechanics
twilight mechanics is a window onto the unfathomable, a channel through the unconscious on the landfill of the Anthropocene.
Walk into a space to witness familiar narratives collapse. In his current body of work, Baracz examines the impact of the crawling civilizational collapse on the individual psyche.
Using materials sourced from the fringes of industrial production, Baracz crafts works that redirect our gaze inward, onto what isn’t readily apparent, the submerged regions of the self. His probing, associative poetic reframes modes of perception, and manifests ways in which our notion of reality, impacted by the manifold crises, is disfigured.
—Izabela Gola
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Jan Baracz is a Polish born artist living in New York since 1981. He’s known for his installation works, sculptures and photography. Baracz has shown internationally at the Contemporary Art Center, Warsaw, Poland, The Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Poland, Art Unlimited, Basel, Switzerland and artMbassy Gallery, in Berlin, Germany. Baracz's video Eyebeads by Words Held Fast premiered in New York in 2006. In 2008, he produced the cinematic installation LIVE VIDEO at Art in General in NYC, and in 2012 he exhibited his sculptural project How to Float Above the Psychic Stampede and Other Traditional Remedies at the Stoyanov Gallery in NYC. 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 MOCA in Peekskill, NY from 2017 to 2019. In 2022 Konnotation Press published his photography book, Eyebeads by Words Held Fast. His last solo exhibition Mutiny’s Darling (2023) at Peninsula in NYC was reviewed in 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 publications.
Jan Baracz: twilight mechanics is supported by the Polish Cultural Institute New York
