Rodeo Gallery, Istanbul Turkey

BURN THESE EYES CAPTAIN,

AND THROW THEM IN THE SEA !!

Rey Akdogan, Andy Coolquit, Eloise Hawser, Tamara Henderson, Ann Cathrin November Høibo, Běla Kolářová, Ian Law, Ron Nagle, Ken Okiishi, Colin Whitaker, Viola Yeşiltaç

Materials thrown away by our society and useless things of the everyday, take significant meanings and poetically become different forms, abstract shapes, sometimes unrecognizable and far away from the original object and its function. This is not a new story: artists have been gathering from the streets and use the original source to make new work since maybe a hundred years, since the rise of a social system that throws away and keeps buying; the replaced object is usually a different quality, a different material and design to the previous. How impossible it is to preserve and at the same time how easy it is to make something that lasts forever. Forever? What is most recent though, is how our bodies are used in consuming, sucking everything and everywhere using different spaces all the time, our body in the office, at the airport, in the park, at home, online; that easiness and constant flux has unavoidably created a strong sense of detachment, better say detouchment. Surfaces become (in) significant, materials too. Apps do dominate. A society obsessed with preservation, archiving and classification, obsessive professionalization where everyone, and the artist at the center, becomes a medium for experiencing spaces. The architecture of the gallery and the artist’s work. How easily such things can go wrong. How do artists respond to gallery spaces is also not a new story, but since the world has become full of art spaces of all sorts it is significant to highlight that.

This is not a show against the machines; machines are the creations of our imagination and fantasies. This is an effort to look at hand made things and dream. Again. We take for granted the predominance of conceptual practices and the fabricated works it has produced and keeps producing in collaboration with manufacturers of all kinds. This exhibition looks at artists whose work is aware of the conceptual tradition and processes and follows it in a way that things are communicated in a social and sensible way hand in hand with great imagination and freedom, while creating new languages, new channels of looking at things. Materials become central this time and craftsmanship too. Fabrication is not a means to an end.