Fotograf Magazine

In 2004, the Velryba Gallery in Prague hosted an exhibition of two young artists, Filip Láb (b. 1976) and Bára Mrázková (b. 1978), entitled Americká noc (Day for Night). The artists jointly presented a series of eight large- format photographs (180 x 137cm and 115 x 89cm), accompanied by a relatively short, but quite witty and incisive video loop. As the artists themselves elucidated in a text introducing the presentation, they chose as their starting point the aesthetic of the 1980s. In some aspects, this is certainly not a ”rosy“ period, but it must be said that it is not entirely uninspiring, either. The artists’ presentation of such artefacts was of decent quality, undoubtedly enhanced by their installation on the bare brick walls of the gallery, which seemed to underline their almost minimalist severity. The title of the exhibition itself, then, will not be unfamiliar to the initiated (”day for night“, or ”American night“ – in the literal translation from the Czech, is a cinematic approach in which night scenes are shot during the day), and rather aptly captures the melan- choly, and at times even tragic, message of the works on exhibit.