ARTISTS STATEMENT
With the uprise of mobile devices, the infrastructural needs of the telecommunication industry have exploded, and since the 1980s, cell towers have started to fill the cityscapes. The scenery changed dramatically when the first antenna was transformed into an artificial pine tree in 1992 by a company called Larson Camouflage: a company that had worked for Disney. Disney and the term “Disneyfication” has a certain tradition in sociology and is used to describe the consumer-oriented transformation of the environment into a spectacle. Jean Baudrillard writes in his essay "Simulation," “Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and America surrounding it are no longer real but of the order of the hyper-real and of simulation”. Baudrillard’s observation that the relationship between simulation and reality is radically twisted in California points to this transformation and its effects on our perception.
The images from the series Second Nature show the artifacts of the digital age that became a part of the Southern California landscape. These camouflaged communication and surveillance infrastructures can be described as a “societal preference for ‘fake’ aesthetics over ‘ugly’ reality” (Amy Clarke).
Isik Kaya
Equipped with a camera, Kaya explores urban spaces and documents the uncanny atmospheres and qualities of architecture and our built environment at night. In exhibitions she turns her discoveries into photographic installations. Of utmost importance for these installations is the examination of the relationship between light and the photographic reproduction.
Thomas Georg Blank
Moving between research and speculative interpretations, Blank explores how spatial and habitual representations of individual and collective imagination affect the world we're living in and vice versa. By creating multidirectional, spatial narratives he offers spectators a space for reconfiguration and change of perspective.
www.isikkaya.com
On exhibit at Windmill Library from January 27, 2022 through April 12, 2022
Monday: 10:00AM – 8:00PM
Tuesday: 10:00AM – 8:00PM
Wednesday: 10:00AM – 8:00PM
Thursday: 10:00AM – 8:00PM
Friday: 10:00AM – 6:00PM
Saturday: 10:00AM – 6:00PM
Sunday: 10:00AM – 6:00PM
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