Painting with Light
Derya Akay
GALLERY 295
September 5 - December 24, 2014
The invitation of Derya Akay into the Lightbox project space marks a departure for the traditional programming of the lightbox space as the work Akay has produced is not as much a conventional photographic print as it is an expansion of what can be understood as photographic. In this piece Akay builds on his diverse practice of ceramics, painting, scanning, and installation while envisioning the lightbox as an object ripe in photographic potential. As an illuminated object and as a frame, the lightbox sets forward Akay’s understanding of the ability photography has to bring banal objects to life with the use of light, perspective, and adjustment. For Akay, light as a photographic element is essential to the piece. Titled "Lightbox Painting with Scans" Akay’s work also revitalizes the links photography has to painting through the relationships both practices have with light. Using the lightbox as an object for installation, Akay synthesizes the influence photography has on reading objects within the constraints of a 48x70” frame. Painted transparent, semi-transparent surfaces, photographic scans and materials transform the lightbox into a viewfinder (in Turkish: kadraj) likening the visual experience to that of looking through a camera, providing a flattened slice out of a perceptual reality disconnected from an embodied experience. Working through these material measures, the luminosity of the lightbox itself brings a resurgent depth to the assembled objects within the frame and emphasizes the physical painterly gestures that call the work back into the embodied perceptual realm.
Exhibition text Patryk Stasieczek, co-curated with Jason Gowans.