Jerzy Tabor

„ Projection”

11.12 -15.03.2022

Signum Foundation Gallery  Łódź  85 Piotrkowska St.

The presented works date from recent years. They were inspired by an unspecified visual disturbance that I developed as a result of strong emotions and a consequence of gazing into the cold light of the light box that in animation serves to control changes over time. The visual experience of unreal images superimposing themselves on reality became for me a point of departure for reflecting on the relativity of awakening and fading memories. That which cannot be recognized can be a subject for studying our obsessions and anxieties. In abstraction, we can confront the image and learn what emotions we project. This requires overcoming the fear of what can be seen. It is like looking into the mirror — and there is nothing more terrible and more fascinating at the same time than seeing through oneself. For me, what is most attractive is the lack of representation, or the moment of hiding it. Halftones emerging from darkness do not show what the immutable and objective state of things is, but rather reveal the unconscious. In this case, we are dealing with a double projection — the projected image and the eye, active in the projection of its visions.

Jerzy Tabor

Jerzy Tabor works in the field of abstraction, which most fully conveys his experiences, memories, emotional states, and psychophysical conditions in filmic works — animations, drawings, and photographs. The map of his personal experiences becomes part of the viewer’s gaze precisely by means of abstraction. “Perhaps you see the way I do?” he asks. In this approach, the possibility opens up of feeling and being together — of an encounter devoid of aestheticization, monumental gesture, visual effects. Held at the Signum Gallery, the exhibition, which also serves as Jerzy Tabor’s graduation project for a degree in Animation at the Faculty of Cinematography, features animations, films, installations, drawings, and light-creative photographic documentations. These works form a constellation of emotional, pulsating living images that become imprinted in our memory through their multilevel, intimate narrative and the author’s original attitude. I am not dazzled by sharp light. Quite the contrary, I like gazing into it to see more. I also like examining my own reflection in mystery and making it my own, being at its centre. Jerzy Tabor’s works are an invitation to enter a mystery. Now I see like him.

Wojciech Puś

supervisor

Biography

Jerzy Tabor is an animator whose works have been presented at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (film Nonrecognition, in the online exhibition MSN Home Office. Intimacy as Text, curator: Natalia Sielewicz, 2020), the Xawery Dunikowski Museum of Sculpture — Branch of the National Museum in Warsaw (light installation/animation The Kiss, as part of the concert At Dawn, curators: Anna Miczko and Krzysztof Bagiński), or at the Fotofestiwal Łódź (an essay in the the publication Infinity and a series of works on silk as part of the Infinity space, in the exhibition Re:Incarnation, curator: Józef Robakowski, 2021). His visual artworks have been published in Wormhole (Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, 2020), Infinity (Fotofestiwal / PWSFTViT Łódź, 2021), and as a series of unique covers for the music album Nonrecognition (Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw / Ocalenie Foundation, 2020), among other publications. He is an author of animations and projections for the shows Gulliver’s Adventures (dir. Paweł Miśkiewicz, 2019) and The Drowning Girl (dir. Karol Klugowski, 2021) at the Stary Theatre in Cracow. Author of animated sequences and visual effects in the film Endless and the series Queer Landscapes (dir. Wojciech Puś, premiere at the Musée du Louvre, Paris, and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, as part of the festival Rencontres Internationales, 2021).

Signum Foundation Gallery, ul. Piotrkowska 85, Łódź