The following is a story I wrote about one of my teachers, Chad Eby, for a Journalism class.
UK faculty exhibit in Krakow, Poland
The whirr of a microwave. A step, the hum of a refrigerator. Another step, the rumble of a water heater. The sounds you don’t usually notice, but are always there.
This is what Chad Eby, an assistant professor at the University of Kentucky, focused on for his display at “The Open Tenement,” a temporary art exhibit put on by the faculty of the Krakow Academy of Art in Poland (ASP-Krakow).
The UK College of Fine Arts and ASP-Krakow have established a reciprocal agreement to exchange students, faculty and artwork.
In 2022, ASP-Krakow professor Tomasz Winiarski came to UK’s campus as a visiting artist, followed by UK Associate Professor Jonathan McFadden and UK Assistant Professor David Wischer travelling to Krakow.
In 2023, several UK faculty members and a Transylvania University faculty member travelled to Poland.
In February 2024, five ASP-Krakow faculty presented a collaborative exhibition at UK’s Bolivar Art Gallery and Transy’s Morlan Gallery.
The most recent evidence of this partnership is “The Open Tenement” exhibit by ASP-Krakow, which invited four UK faculty, including Eby, to join 10 ASP-Krakow faculty to display at the Hipolit Tenement House in Krakow, Poland.
UK College of Fine Arts plans to send another delegation, this time including students, to the Centre of Polish Sculpture in Oronsko, Poland at the end of November.
“We’re sending one student every spring to Krakow and they will start sending a student here,” Eby said. “We’re hoping to increase that relationship to the point where we’re sending maybe three students both ways.”
Eby is a graduate advisor at the UK College of Fine Arts, School of Art and Visual Studies. He works in art studio, film, video, sonic art and digital media design.
“The Open Tenement” took place in the Hipolit Tenement House, a 17th century house and a branch of the Historical Museum of the City of Krakow.
“This building is really, really old and it is like a house museum. But it ran afoul of Poland’s equivalent of the Americans with Disabilities Act because it wasn’t accessible by wheelchair, so they had to close it,” Eby said. “So the museum as a museum has been closed, but apparently there’s a loophole in the law and that allows temporary exhibits to be exempt, so we were able to have this show there.”
The concept of the show was the idea of domesticity and home. Projects focused on living life, moving, having a house and not having a house.
Eby’s piece, the “Hum of the Refrigerator,” was mostly a sound piece. Using a mmWave sensor to detect motion in a range of about 24 feet, Eby set up zones in his display’s area, within which a particular sound would play.
Eby’s display was situated in the basement of the old house.
“Imagine like a stone vault about 40 feet wide and maybe 8, 10 feet across,” Eby said. “With this huge, vaulted ceiling like a catacomb, essentially, underneath the house.”
As visitors moved through the space, they would hear each of Eby’s recorded sounds throughout the pre-determined zones.
“I was looking at this idea that there are all of these devices in our house that just make sound that we pretty much ignore,” Eby said. “Things like the refrigerator, the air conditioner, the washing machine, the dishwasher, there are all these things we have that operate, more or less, on their own.”
This was Eby’s second trip to Krakow.
“When I went before, we went with a delegation, we were kind of shepherded around,” Eby said. “This time, I went on my own. I rented a small, very small apartment there in Kazimierz and that was sort of base of operations the whole time.”
From this base of operations, Eby had to finalize his display for the show.
“I was spending late nights refining the code and what was hilarious was I literally was not happy with the code until the day of the opening,” Eby said. “It was not until the very last day, the day of the opening, that I finally got the code working the way that I wanted it to work. I was very pleased, but also I was sweating a little bit.”
While Eby speaks virtually no Polish, he said this was not an issue. Most of the ASP-Krakow faculty spoke some English and everyone was kind and patient.
After the exhibit opening, he was invited to give the inaugural address to the incoming class of Intermedia at ASP-Krakow with simultaneous translation.
“But what they meant by simultaneous translation was I would say a sentence or two then would have to be quiet while the translator repeated what I had just said,” Eby said. “I was not prepared. I was supposed to give a 40 minute talk, but I didn’t realize that the time would be more than doubled, so it was a long talk.”
This exhibit is just one more for Eby to add to his number of local and international shows.