Jeremiah Chechik
"Chechik’s real concern is how, if at all, we can truly know anything. In every case, his work argues, perception precedes seeing; what any visual subject—will mean to us is predetermined by the conceptual lens through which we consciously, or unconsciously, regard them."
– Richard Vine
The subtly investigative prints Chechik has created over the past five decades explore how deeply assimilated concepts and pictorial devices condition our daily experience. These exquisite constructs—combining 21st-century digital technology (advanced design software and artificial intelligence) with traditional ink-and-paper printing of the highest quality (Piezography with carbon inks on Hahnemühle paper, copper-coated aluminum, or glass)—are more than just visually stunning and thoroughly aesthetic in intent. They also raise key questions about the nature of knowledge in our media-saturated age.
--Richard Vine
"Jeremiah Chechik, the works displayed here attest, is obsessed with the porous boundary between fact and fiction. Perhaps that’s because his professional biography is itself something of a contemporary fairytale...While others might have been distracted by such glamour, Chechik has always focused on the deeper implications of his craft, treating storytelling as a cultural template and image-making as an epistemological tool."
--Richard Vine
Jeremiah Chechik was born in Montreal, Canada, and grew up surrounded by books, homemade radios, and every issue of Popular Mechanics and Popular Science ever published. He received a scholarship to McGill University in physics but at the last moment shifted his major to arts. He directed plays, studied with John Grierson, the father of British and Canadian documentary film, and later became his assistant. After graduating, Chechik moved to Toronto, worked as a master printmaker for the rare books library at University of Toronto, and experimented with the integration of photographic processes with stone lithography, photogravure, and laser holography. His first solo show was at the legendary A-Space Gallery in Toronto in 1976.
Chechik's photographs caught the eye of advertising executives and fashion magazine editors, which led him to Milan where he worked as a fashion photographer for Italian Vogue. Soon he moved to New York and began a meteoric rise as a director of groundbreaking and award winning commercials. Even as he worked in commercial filmmaking, he kept a focus on writing, science, design, and above all, photography, his personal medium of expression as an artist.
Chechik's film career includes directing Christmas Vacation, Benny and Joon, and Diabolique, as well as producing The Bronx Is Burning and, most recently, Reginald the Vampire. Meanwhile, his photographic work evolved technically and aesthetically, as he explored new ways of creating and presenting imagery that in his words "moves the conversation and language of the photographic image forward."
In 2016 Chechik began experimenting with gaming technology, leading to a body of work called Virtual Street Photography. In 2019 he exhibited large plate glass imagery of surreal landscapes in a solo exhibition at the Show Gallery, Los Angeles, followed by a major solo show at the Museum of Architecture and Design in Buenos Aires. In 2020 his digital animated work was exhibited at Bright Moments Gallery in Venice Beach, California, where he resides. Recent shows include group shows, Outer Orbit/Out of Orbit, March 2023, and Wings of Desire Sept 2023 at Lichtundfire Gallery in New York, and 3 Artists at Yiwei Gallery at Shanghai Photo. Examples of his digital work will appear at the Venice Biennale in 2024, as part of an exhibition organized by the international digital arts organization Bright Moments.