Vernisáž Tomáš Fiala: Stars & Stripes

“In a world where time is a quality…events glide through the space of the imagination, materialized by a look, a desire… the time between events is long or short, depending on the background of contrasting events, the intensity of illumination, the degree of light and shadow, the view of the participants.”1

With an eye for irony and structure, Tomas Fiala’s achromatic images capture quintessentially American narratives and structures in his series of photographs and lenticular prints. Photographed during his four-month stay in the U.S. in late 2017, Fiala curates his participants with curiosity, empathy, and humor, and sequences and inserts dramatic urban compositions (Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Chicago, New York City, Miami) and rural settings (Pleasant Hill, Kentucky and Oxford, Ohio) as compositional counterpoints. That he has titled his series Stars and Stripes brings bold juxtapositions and contradictions of culture – religious, political, social, racial into a new focus through fresh observations that play with the essence of Americans’ history and perception of their world.

The moments, the events of time and space captured in Fiala’s still photographs take on new dimensional realities, a kind of interactive animation through his exploration of lenticular composite images. The viewer must physically move past the work, or manually move the work in order to view the graphically changing images, that continually erase and reinscribe themselves. Lenticular technology, most commonly known for greeting cards and commercial applications, is the perfect vehicle for moving Fiala’s images through interlaced layers of memory, travel, and space. Time is a quality.

Susan R. Ewing
Oxford, Ohio
April 2018

1 Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams (New York: Warner Books, 1993), 127.