Two artists who instantly seized my interests.
Dominik Lejman
One of the most respected and renounced Polish artists. Lejman makes brilliant use of light and overlapping projected images to construct his art pieces. This is all too vague and abstract perhaps, so let me try to give you a clearer picture by describing what usually happens when you go to see one of his pieces in an exhibition hall:
First, there’s a projected image on a wide, blank wall, (still or with hardly detectible movements), overlapped with a different projected image. And as there’s an overhead projector hanging right opposite that wall, when you move up close and in front of the projector, you’ll find your own image or shadow immediately merged with the exhibit. It’s as if you are drawn uncannily to the mysterious theme of the piece, sucked and trapped in an unknown world, becoming part of it, perhaps even against your will.
One of the exhibits was the projected image of the back of a naked human’s back in a dark space (can’t tell his/her sex), with streaks of light swaying across it. When you walk up to it, and find your image overlap with it, an eerie chill will dance up your spine as it looks like you’re suddenly trapped in the loner’s chamber.
Of course the viewer is not always kidnapped into Lejman’s mysterious world. There’re some exhibits which involve two overlapping images, one still, the other with moving objects, usually sections of life in modern Poland like people crossing the road, or patterns of crowded streets.
I think Lejman’s works are poignant, powerful and utterly lonely. To me, they call to mind the bitterness and successive, scandalous betrayals in the history of modern Poland – the hopeless but persistent resistance movement planned and carried out almost entirely in the capital’s underground canals during Nazi occupation; the promised Allies’ and Soviet’s assistance that never came; the Iron Curtain that fell upon her immediately after the war, despite reassurances of freedom from the West – a string of dark agreements and exploitations which effectively barred her from democracy and independence for nearly 50 years. Lejman’s semi-transparent figures or world projected on the wall were like a lonely, abandoned past, a phantom. Yet once stirred up, one is inevitably drawn to it (cos your own image is in turn projected onto the ‘exhibit’.) You realize that you and the seemingly forgotten past are intertwined. The works are lead-heavy.
But the intriguing bit is, it’s not necessarily so. Lejman too illuminated public places like subways (underground walkways, not underground trains) and cathedrals with moving lights, effectively flinging in a bit of live, a bit of fun to the grim and otherwise solemn and daunting places. There’s an impressive project which was the joint-effort of Lejman and a London hospital. Using his signature overlapping, moving projected images, the artist was keen on bringing some chuckles and laughter to sick children. Brightly coloured animals like flamingos, blue whales, sleek lizards scampered on walls and ceilings, scurried along otherwise pale corridors, inviting the small inmates to chase and pounce on these fleeting, boisterous shadows. What you’ll also see in the clip below are pedestrians slightly spooked by the flashing, darting light in the grey subway. In this way, art indeed fits perfectly well into life, the life of ordinary people.
Lejman’s works (stills):
http://www.polishculture-nyc.org/lejman_works.htm
Brief biography of Lejman (with clips of his works for download)
http://www.polishculture-nyc.org/archive/art/2004/Lejman_AnimatingSpaces.htm
Islander 