Bellevue Arts Museum invites you to experience Them, a large-scale printing project that will produce a major new artwork for the Museum’s Forum space. Them is a project of Polish-born, US-based multimedia artist Piotr Szyhalski. The artist produces his work under the name of Labor Camp—an ongoing art project that references his upbringing in communist Poland, and his interest in the grammar and iconography of labor and protest.

Visitors will have the opportunity to watch Szyhalski produce Them on site over five days on several hundred feet of Tyvek. The artist will use two and a half foot-high letters cut from insulating foam with a custom fabricated printing press. The final product will become a new installation in the Bellevue Arts Museum Forum. The text of the artwork, rolling out over the period of the artist’s residency, is a passionate polemic against the oppression of the majority by oligarchs on both the left and right.

About Piotr Szyhalski

Piotr Szyhalski’s work has been exhibited worldwide at such venues as the International Center of Photography, the New York Expo Film Festival, Siggraph, ISEA Paris, the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, the San Jose Museum of Art, and Experimenta Design in Lisbon, Portugal, and featured in a variety of catalogs and publications. His pieces are in the collections of the Walker Art Center, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and others.

In addition to his own performance-based projects, he was commissioned to develop large-scale, interactive, live projections for Wim Mertens quartet in Brussels (1998), the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra (2001), and VocalEssence (2004). He released two CDs as Labor Camp Orchestra for the multimedia installations Theater of Operations (2007, 2009).