References to ancient and speculative technologies permeate the exhibition. Rusted Cold War emergency water canisters stamped “Property of the U.S. Government, 1953” rest alongside cinder blocks that evoke both brutalist fallout shelters and sacred desert architecture. Synthetic sand mingles with organic soil. Water, meant to save, instead seeps, rusts, and destroys. In his series Evaporation Lines , Cichocki renders old data-card topographies and patchwork grids in metallic watercolors, their surfaces catching light like liquid mercury. A cavernous black-light chamber cycles between daylight neutrals and hallucinogenic nocturnes, making the works appear to shape-shift under UV spectra. At their core, they remain abstract, cosmic, molecula r — fractal inversions of neurons, root systems, and galactic clusters. There’s a robust art historical lineage here, one that includes light and space artists like Mary Corse and Lita Albuquerque , land art figures Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt, Vivian Suter’s canvas jungles, and Walter De Maria’s boxes of soil, bringing the vast terrain into human space and scale. Cichocki, too, brings the land insid e — not only as material but as living, unpredictable systems. “We live not, in reality, on the summit of a solid earth, but at the bottom of an ocean of air,” he reminds us, citing Thales of Miletus’ prescient 600 B.C. observation on the intersection of natural science and human perception. Cichocki’s art translates that invisible connection into strikingly visible form.
CONTINUE READING
