About the Exhibition
Serkan Ӧzkaya
How do you really know where you are, or what is real? This is the playful and introspective query posed by Serkan Ӧzkaya’s O, imagined in the simple, ephemeral form of a giant bubble. A brief glance or deep contemplation of the eight-foot diameter, transparent, water-filled Plexiglas orb presents a world upside down: the surrounding spaces and faces are reflected in reverse, deploying the uncanny into the everyday. To describe this artistic heterotopia, in which passersby see the floor beneath them as the ceiling and their own reflections where their bodies are not, Ӧzkaya selected a poem written for children:
Each time I see the Upside-Down man
Standing in the water
I look at him and start to laugh
Although I shouldn’t oughtter
For maybe in another world
Another time
Another town
Maybe HE is right side up
And I am upside down
–Shel Silverstein (1981)
Art history, too, echoes through O: during the 17th century, the theme Homo bulla est (man is a bubble) was popular among Dutch masters. These paintings, created by Rembrandt, Jacob van Loo, and others, depicting Cupid, putti, or human children blowing bubbles, were conceived and understood as vanitas images, reminders of the brevity of life. Like novelist Milan Kundera, who wrestles with love and politics and mortality in The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), the artist struggles—and plays—with existential questions, those which are the most profoundly human: “It is questions with no answers that set the limit of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence,” writes Kundera. Ӧzkaya’s art enacts a Borgesian drama in which we are all dreaming each other into dreaming the dream of our fragile, fraught, and beautiful, brief lives. The complex, compelling relationships between the physical and psychological experience of space, light, and form is further explored in the artworks surrounding O.
About the artist
Serkan Özkaya is known for his conceptual artworks that range from sculpture and installation, to video and digital applications. Some of Özkaya’s recent projects include ni4ni, an immersive installation which uses reflections to turn a human-sized sphere into an eyeball; We Will Wait, a recreation of Marcel Duchamp’s Étant donnés, that was installed at Duchamp’s studio in New York and operated as a camera obscura; An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in New York, which dissolved the walls by covering them with projections of what’s going on just beyond them; Mirage, which consisted of a shadow of a passenger airplane crossing the room every four minutes; One and Three Pasta (with George L. Legendre), where the duo created 3D computer models for ninety-two types of pasta after Legendre’s mathematical equations and David (inspired by Michelangelo), a gold-plated replica two-times the size of the original, erected on Main Street in Louisville, KY at 21c Museum Hotel. Özkaya was born in Istanbul and now lives and works in New York and Toronto.
