Opening a blind eye to art

Walker Evans, the great American photographer, believed that "art demands the intelligent pain or care behind each speck of brick, each spot of paint."

Molly Radecki's photo exhibit "From This Point: A Retrospective," ongoing at the Blind Eye pub in Žižkov, grapples with the emotional tension between a static past and a fluid future with care and a pained intelligence of which even Evans could approve. Rather than veering toward abstraction, 35 featured photographs - which Radecki says question gender roles and the idea of place - anchor emotions in stark, striking images.

"My imagery is more emotional than anything else," Radecki said. "I tend to pick up the camera as a healing mechanism to deal with certain issues in my life."

"From This Point" is divided into three sections: "The Affair," a group of snapshot-size framed color photographs; "Pieces of Me," a dozen unframed black-and-white prints; and "Between a Nightmare and a Dream," six large framed photos taken with a Browning box camera. Working with this low-tech apparatus has led Radecki toward simpler compositions, she explained.

"My approach is anti-technical, even anti-conceptual," she said. "I've been exploring more visceral imagery."

Radecki's Browning box photos are ethereal, with colors and lines blending into atmosphere, like streetlamps on a foggy night. One night shot of a circus tent strung with lights is enchanting and otherworldly, like something out of Flight of the Navigator.

The black-and-white photographs of "Pieces of Me," which Radecki explained were the most personal pieces in the show, heightened the significance of objects and places by defamiliarizing them. A black-and-white shot of the Náměstí Republiky metro stop is recognizable, yet imbued with a Martian sterility. A glass of red wine shattered against a black-and-white checkered tile floor has a fractured elegance; more than crying over spilled wine, it raises issues of domestic comfort, uncertainty and abuse.

Radecki graduated from FAMU with a master's degree in photography last year, having studied with Czech photographer Václav Jirásek. Jirásek's black-and-white photos achieve a vibrant stillness that many of Radecki's photos reach for and often achieve. Citing a reaction to "the negation of human agency in much of Czech photography," she explained that she is more interested in making photos with emotional rather than conceptual weight.

"I wrote my thesis on Czech postmodern photography, but I think I'd already gone beyond that by the time I finished," she said. "That's part of the reason for creating this retrospective, getting to this point and wondering what I want to do now."

In her five years in Prague, Radecki has become something of an established tripod in the Prague expatriate community. Last fall, she organized the first Žižkov International Photography Festival, which showed work from a variety of photographers from around the world. Radecki plans a second festival this year, a commitment she explains in the artist's statement for "From This Point," as a way of coping with feeling foreign in Prague.

"So, for the moment, I am going to put my traveling wings aside, and focus my attentions on the communities that I belong to," she writes.

The Blind Eye might seem an unlikely place to hold a photography exhibition, and indeed it is. The photographs hang in a small room, cramped with couches, which doesn't allow for easy access.

This is a shame, as Radecki's work merits observation and contemplation. Bringing art out of museums is certainly laudable, but not every venue does its content justice.

In addition to Radecki's photographs, four mixed-media sculptures hang on the wall at the room's entrance. Consisting of sundry materials, including wood, a model fighter jet, slathered gunmetal paint and string, the pieces are the work of "Alfred," a local artist who was too nervous to make an appearance at the April 1 opening night.

These pieces added physical weight to Radecki's emotional peregrinations.

Stephan Delbos can be reached at
sdelbos@praguepost.com