In the series Machines (photography and video, 2005) on home-modified and individualistic tractors, Skapski honors the Yankee ingenuity of Polish farmers, illustrating a human capacity for pragmatically resisting totalitarian oppression.

Location 1 presents recent photography as well as ten video works by Lukasz Skapski, whose themes resonate well beyond Poland itself. With a sharp but compassionate eye for the absurdities of the human condition, he reveals a sense of humor about the world, about his own media, and about himself.

The work concerns cultural and political issues, including the emotional ambivalence of women and nursing mothers, people's views of the environment in which they live, the legacy of Communist practices in farming communities, as well as the practice and tradition of film itself. In all his work, the artist demonstrates an uncanny ability to capture people's circumstances on film and video. He listens; he seizes detail and human interaction; he brings out the absurd and the humorous in the situations that he records. The particular sense of irony for which he is well known makes many of his works quite hilarious.

The show will also include several videos by the AZORRO GROUP, an artists’ collaborative of which Skapski is a founding member, and whose work centers on the paradoxes of the institutional circuit of art. They ask: what is contemporary art like? Where are artists and curators located? The questions are intentionally naďve and the sequences often amusing and absurd.

This exhibition is made possible, in part, by funds from the Trust for Mutual Understanding.

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