Lars Jan

Lars Jan (born 1978) is a Los Angeles–based director and multidisciplinary artist, whose practice spans performance, photography, print media, sculpture, single and multi-channel video works, installations, and writing. His original works have been presented by The Whitney Museum of American Art, Sundance Film Festival, and theaters and festivals around the world. Jan is the founder and artistic director of Early Morning Opera, an art lab that creates large-scale works "exploring emerging technologies, live audiences, and unclassifiable experience." As a visual artist, he is represented by Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles. He received a BA from Swarthmore College in 2000, and graduated from CalArts with an MFA in directing and integrated media in 2008.

Water and environmental issues are prominent themes in his art practice. Jan is influenced by California Light and Space Movement artists Robert Irwin, James Turrell, and Doug Wheeler. "They're playing with perception and they're interested in the eye as an apparatus that connects to the brain and processes information in a very particular way," Jan notes. "The eye can be manipulated. Reality can be adjusted."

In October 2010, ABACUS premiered at the inaugural Filament festival at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) in Troy, New York. In September 2011, it was announced that "Paul" was invited to give his presentation in the "New Frontier" program at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah to be followed by a series of lectures at REDCAT in Los Angeles in February 2012. In 2014 the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) invited Abacus to share his presentation for the first time on the East Coast of the United States as part of the fall Next Wave Festival.

The show drew inspiration from the work of polymath R. Buckminster Fuller.

Holoscenes (Since 2014) Holoscenes is a performance and installation that takes place in a 12-ton glass aquarium in public space. Holoscenes first premiered in Toronto's Nuit Blanche festival in 2014, and has since been shown around the world including in Miami, Sarasota, London, Abu Dhabi, Australia's Gold Coast, and New York's Times Square.

In this aquarium, performers attempt to carry out daily tasks submitted by people in over 40 countries—including making a bed, reading the newspaper, selling fruit, cleaning windows, and coiling a garden hose—as the tank fills with water in as little as one minute, and drains, multiple times during the performance, simulating a flash flood. Jan says he wants viewers to "feel climate change in their guts, rather than just understand it." The work was also shown on screens in the Geneva Conference Center during an event in 2018 organized by the UN Refugee agency and International Council of Voluntary Agencies, involving over 300 government officials from 90 countries. Since then, it has been also been performed at BAM, the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA, the Wexner Center for the Arts, and The Sydney Festival. Jan received permission from Didion to use her words in his work.

The performance of The White Album largely unfolds within a white sound-proofed room that has one entire wall made of plexiglass panels. Viewers consist of two audience groups: about twenty college-age adults referred to as the "inner audience," Of the production, Jan said "I want to know what can actually be transferred from the past to the present that can be a tool that we use to interrogate the most vital questions that were raised in 1968 and continue today." Alluding to the hurricanes that frequent the Miami coast and tides affected by celestial movements, as well as Japanese rock gardens and Angkor Wat, the work, Jans says, is both a foreboding commentary about climate change and a space for contemplation. Kathleen Forde, the curator of the Audemars Piguet Art Commission that year, writes that Slow-Moving Luminaries evokes "the passage of time, ephemerality, the blurring between built and wild landscapes, as well as responding to its immediate surroundings while raising universal concerns about our future." Jan considers the audience's participation in viewing and moving through the space as much part of the work as the structure itself,

While growing up in Massachusetts, Jan had little contact with his father, Henryk Ryniewicz, whom he described as "an enigmatic person and a misanthrope." He became the subject matter of Jan's The Institute of Memory (TIMe)—his first autobiographical work, influenced in part by Polish director, Tadeusz Kantor. A Suicide Bombing By Invitation Only (2010) Takes (2010) (in collaboration with Nichole Canuso Dance Company) Odyssey of the Odyssey (2015) (in collaboration with Roger Guenveur Smith) Makandal (2014) Blood of the Fang Music Video (2019) (Clipping, Daveed Diggs) Psychocosmonautics (2004)