Most of the time, art museums take great care to properly light their exhibitions.
For the next six months, the Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University is essentially doing the opposite with a major exhibition featuring shadows and darkness. In fact, it’s called “Darkness.”
Artist Jan Tichy is no stranger to the Broad. In 2017, he was the mastermind behind a project focused on the Flint water crisis with faucets, pipes and an audio track. The piece was called “Beyond Streaming: A Sound Mural for Flint.”
Museum Senior Curator Steven Bridges has known Tichy for years and chose him for the second exhibition in the institution’s Signature Commission Series. Bridges thought the artist was up to the task of utilizing the unconventional angles of the museum’s design by architect Zaha Hadid.
"His interest in architecture, his use of both projected light as well as other light-based media in his practice, I knew that he would be an incredible partner," Bridges said.
Tichy, born in Prague and now based in Chicago, has studied and taught photography. Light is a favorite medium.
His exhibition is housed in the museum’s large main floor galleries, and Tichy was intrigued by Hadid’s huge, angular windows. He thinks they have a big impact on what’s inside.
"In a sense of sensitivity to light, these are galleries that you can’t show everything because of the amount of light coming in, but also, there’s a dramatic presence," Tichy explained.
That presence led him to consider what can happen in these spaces without all of that natural light.
“As an artist that is, many times, exploring dark spaces with light, that seemed like a natural way to be endowed with Zaha Hadid," he said.
For “Darkness,” those windows are blacked out. So, are the entrances. With projections and modulated lights, Tichy has created a space that offers a 24-minute experience that models itself after the natural 24-hour cycle of a day. There will be moments of visibility and of complete darkness.
Now the work continues — your monthly gift helps maintain this success and keeps public media free for all.
Tichy feels while we can’t live without the light, we also can’t live without some darkness.
The smaller of the two galleries, the one away from those blacked-out windows, will feature works inspired by a series of academic research projects uniting Tichy with faculty and students at MSU.
“That sort of resulted in these four collaborations with these four researchers that in a way inspired me to create a new work, as well as hopefully feature their work as a part of this larger platform for our audience.”
One of those projects, conducted with the Department of Entomology, included the collection of insects around the Broad every month for a year, to see if there were changes based on the circadian shifts of natural and artificial light. Tichy has created nine photographic prints of what was found.
“I used the found specimens that we found during the research and used them as the negatives to be enlarged on photographic paper and creating this sort of an atlas of the species of the museum grounds.”
With this exhibition, you might just find yourself more in tune with your own relationship with the dark.
“Jan Tichy: Darkness” opens at 6 p.m. on Friday January 30 at MSU’s Broad Art Museum, and runs through late July.
The Broad Art Museum is a financial supporter of WKAR.
UPCOMING ARTS EVENTS
The Peppermint Creek Theatre Company is staging "Fatherland," a drama based on the true story of a young man who turned in his father for taking part in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. That’s Friday and Saturday at 7 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m. at the Stage One Performing Arts Center in Lansing, with five more performances the following week.
The Jackson Symphony Orchestra and Jackson County Fair present "Concert Aglow: Best of Broadway" at 7 p.m. Friday and Saturday at the Jackson County Tower Ballroom.
The Michigan State University College of Music celebrates with the annual "Happy Birthday, Mozart!" concert on Monday, January 26 at 7:30 p.m., in the Fairchild Theatre at the MSU Auditorium.
