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Piotr Szyhalski
Piotr Szyhalski
Born	Piotr Szyhalski; 1967 (age 56–57); Kalisz, Poland
Education	Academy of Visual Arts, Poznań
Known for	Graphic design, Installation art, New media art

Piotr Szyhalski is a Polish-born and trained multimedia artist working in the United States since 1990. He has produced poster designs, mail art, photographs, painted murals, prints, web-based digital art, sound art, large installations, and public performances. Since 1998 he has worked under the pseudonym Labor Camp.^[1]

Life and education

From Kalisz in central Poland, Szyhalski studied at the Academy of Visual Arts in Poznań graduating in 1989 with an MFA in drawing under Waldemar Świerzy and an MFA in poster design under Jarosław Kozłowski.^[2] In 1990 Szyhalski came to the United States to teach graphic design at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Since 1994 he has been a professor of media arts at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.^[3]

Selected works

Private Post-Cards (1987–1990)

Before Szyhalski himself traveled outside of Poland, his mail art had reached a network of correspondents around the world in the form of postcards. These were contact prints on photographic paper from handmade negatives, either paper cutouts glued to glass or cliché verre designs scratched into a black-coated glass plate.^[4] Some of these Private Post-Cards were published in zines like Lloyd Dunn's PhotoStatic.

Electric posters (1996)

Each of these 30 animated posters "slowly evolves through a series of carefully orchestrated transitions of text and image," usually contradicting the initial message and confounding viewers' expectations.^[5] The animation speed was not programmed, but was based on the inherent limitations of the early internet: slow download speeds, HTML 2.0 and Netscape 1.1.

Szyhalski commented, "[T]his really isn't about computers anymore.... This is no longer about the tools, this is a new possibility of communicating thoughts and feelings.... I work on little posters on the internet, but they are never things, only ideas.... Suddenly you can just communicate thought.... [I]t reaches you but you can't buy it."^[6]

Ding an sich (1996)

This interactive web-based artwork was the first commission of the Walker Art Center's New Media Initiatives department.^[7] The New York Times on the Web commented, "Szyhalski's user-controlled creation is deeply involving and richly allusive. It is his most fully realized work to date and one of the most accomplished pieces of art on the Web.... Like Vladimir Nabokov and Tom Stoppard, the Polish-born Szyhalski has an Eastern European's flair for extracting the multiple meanings from a word in his newly adopted tongue."^[8]

The Inward Vessels of the Spleen (1996)

Szyhalski's first website included the Electric Posters and Ding an sich along with thirteen increasingly interactive pieces. The Wall Street Journal quoted Szyhalski as saying "that the Web artist relies on audience participation to make the work exist. In some cases, authorship becomes a joint project between the artist and the viewer."^[9]

Visual interpretation for Stephen Heitzig's Nobel Symphony (2004)

"Originally premiered in 2001, Heitzeg's massive opus was augmented this time by state-of-the-art graphics created by students at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, impressively directed by Piotr Szyhalski and projected on a huge screen above the chorus. Each of the symphony's six sections were introduced by vertical lines oscillating back and forth, leaving words in their wake, and interspersed with images of wood being sawed, shaped, and sanded to construct a chair, reflecting a poignant recurring sentence by Pablo Neruda, 'Peace begins in a single chair.'"^[10]

Dolphin Oracle II (2008)

Interactive multimedia installation by Piotr Szyhalski and Richard Shelton, commissioned by the Walker Art Center. Gallery visitors typed questions to a CGI-animated bottlenose dolphin whose artificial intelligence answered in dolphin noises that were subtitled in English on a large screen.^[11]

COVID-19: Labor Camp Report (2021)

In response to the global COVID-19 pandemic and political and social upheaval in the United States, Szyhalski drew and inked a poster a day from March 24 until the U.S. presidential election on November 3, 2020.^[12] Each of the 225 appeared daily on Instagram. Some were printed by followers and pasted on walls in Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Baltimore, and Philadelphia;^[13] and the entire series was published as a book.^[14] The New York Times said the series used "the style and language of propaganda posters to capture the pain and absurdity of the pandemic, with heavy doses of sarcasm and rage at the federal government's response... [T]he works are meticulous but piercing, like a carefully released primal scream."^[15]

Selected exhibitions, installations, performances

1989: Stories of Love and Work, Galeria Wielka 19, Poznań, Poland
1990: Niedlugo Lepsze Dni (Better Days Soon), Galeria Akumulatory 2, Poznań, Poland
1990: Our Future in Our Hands!, Houston Center for Photography, Houston, Texas
1991: Our Future in Our Hands!, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Work from the New Poland, California Museum of Photography, Riverside
1997: The Electric Posters Exhibition, Silicon Graphics Innovate Online Gallery
2000: Die Zeitstücke (Timeworks), SIGGRAPH 2000, New Orleans, Louisiana; and ISEA 2000, Paris, France
2001: One Art, Lightwork Gallery, Syracuse, New York
2004: Nobel Symphony, Interactive computer-generated visual interpretation of Steve Heitzig's symphony for orchestra and chorus, Orchestra Hall, Minneapolis, Minnesota
2008: Theater of Operations, Ingenuity Fest 4, Cleveland, Ohio
2009: White Star Cluster: The Third Sonic Reenactment of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Laboral Cento de Arte y Creación Industrial, Giron, Spain
2011: Empty Words (so that we can do our living), 9-hour overnight multimedia event with poetry, dance, parade, and concert, Northern Spark Festival, Minneapolis, Minnesota
2012: In Habit: Living Patterns, director of the 9-hour overnight outdoor dance performance by Aniccha Arts, Northern Spark Festival, Minneapolis, Minnesota
2015: Three Factory Pieces, The Soap Factory, Minneapolis, Minnesota
2021: COVID-19: Labor Camp Report, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, Minnesota
2022: Piotr Szyhalski: We Are Working All the Time!, Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis, Minnesota

Awards

Szyhalski received the McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship for Visual Artists in 2009 and 2017.

References

Szyhalski, Piotr; Mullin, Diane (2020). We are working all the time!. Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 9781517909567.

Szyhalski, Piotr; Hesse, Gary (2001). One art: Piotr Szyhalski. Syracuse, New York: Light Work. ISBN 0935445226.

^ Szyhalski & Mullin (2020, p. 161)
^ Szyhalski & Mullin (2020, p. 121-122)
^ Szyhalski & Mullin (2020, p. 149)
^ Szyhalski & Hesse (2001, p. 2)
^ Szyhalski & Hesse (2001, p. 3)
^ Alft, Bryan (1995). "Piotr Szyhalski interview". Contrascience #5. Minneapolis, MN.
^ Rinehart, Richard (February 13, 2015). "The Thingness of the Thing: Conserving Piotr Szyhalski's Ding an Sich". Walker Art Center. Retrieved January 20, 2020.
^ Mirapaul, Matthew (August 14, 1997). "A Museum Piece That the Viewer Can Control". The New York Times. Retrieved January 20, 2020.
^ Frost, Robin (March 20, 1997). "Changing Picture: Web art requires artists to completely rethink their craft; The results are sometimes startling". The Wall Street Journal. R12.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: location (link)
^ Hodges, Bruce (April 18, 2004). "Seen & Heard International Concert Review: Vocal Essence". MusicWeb International. Retrieved January 20, 2022.
^ Bautista, Susana Smith (2014). Museums in the digital age: changing meanings of place, community, and culture. Lanham: Altamira. p. 72. ISBN 9780759124134.
^ Schmelzer, Paul (April 27, 2020). "No Holds Barred: A Look at Piotr Szyhalski's Daily COVID-19 Reports". Walker Art Center. Retrieved December 28, 2022.
^ "Labor Camp: Panel Discussion on Art & Activism". The Print Center. 2021-02-10. Retrieved 2021-07-17.
^ Szyhalski, Piotr; Abrams, Janet; Gaiter, Collette; Del Pesco, Joseph; Finn, Courtney (2001). Covid-19: Labor Camp report. Frank. ISBN 9781737115106.
^ Steinhauer, Julian (October 1, 2020). "Freeing Up the Imagination, Even in a Pandemic". The New York Times. Retrieved July 17, 2021.