Damla Tamer: Experience Class
Thu. May 24th 2018 - Sun. June 17th 2018
@ the fifty fifty arts collective By Donation
Please check our facebook page for a list of current volunteer hours.
*Please Note* Gallery viewing by appointment is welcome and encouraged. We are run and kept open entirely by the effort of volunteer labor. If you know exactly when you are going to come by the exhibition space and want to ensure we will be open, please send us an email before visiting the gallery so we can confirm that we will have someone there to meet you. Exhibition Opening: Thursday, May 24 from 7-10pm
Exhibition dates: May 24-June 16
Performative Artist Talk: June 16th, 5pm
What to do with the intense human desire to relate to the other, in a world where certain modes of relation have been co-opted into the order of the knowable? Is it possible to build a political discourse around the notions of care and hospitality for the other when there is a demand on bodies to focus on their projected self-preservation?
Works in this exhibition search for ethics of agency within existing and abolished frameworks of care, solidarity, hospitality, accountability and perpetuation. The eruption of Gezi protests in Turkey in May 2013 and the unfolding of a variety of civil and state tactics that continually ask for the reorganization of boundaries between collective and individual, symbolic and actual, risky and stable; “becoming a mother” and being placed in a general economy of maintenance as well as caring for a singular creature who has found itself suddenly gravity-bound; and the slow, ongoing evolution of the animal gut neither towards the mouth nor the anus; are among many of the processes that have influenced the motifs in the exhibition. These motifs— collection of items that share affinities with but don’t entirely correspond to memories, metaphors and design components in Damla’s practice— unevenly spread across the works.
A series of monotypes combines an accumulative drawing process with the instant act of pressing down to make the prints, featuring motifs formalized in repeated spatial configurations: young ferns on grids; conversation sets on
spirals; i, h, o, p, e, y, o, u, a, r, e, w, e, l, l on quadrants.
The exhibition also features large scale drawings made with dyes of various concentrations and states of exhaustion as well as inactive solutions prepared from the indigofera tinctoria (the “true indigo”) plant. Drawings are produced
with a combination of vertical actions (dip-dyeing, dripping, capillary action) and horizontal actions (puddling, spreading). Influential is the use of vocabulary in indigofera’s colonial history and its contemporary craft applications — in referral
to the eruption of the Indigo Revolt, appraisal of dye cakes, the disappearance of woad (the “weaker blue”) from cultivation, or revival an exhausted dye vat, among many — which produce an interesting confusion among potency, authenticity, opacity, vividness, solubility, stability and resilience.
Damla invites you to a performative artist talk that will take place on the closing day of the exhibition. She will use anecdotes, descriptions and other rhetorical devices to search for things that have fallen through between the visible and the invisible in the process of the exhibition.
Damla Tamer is a visual artist born in Istanbul, Turkey who currently lives in Vancouver, Canada. She is an active member of artist-run Dynamo Arts Institution, and the Vancouver-based artist mothers collective Art Mamas. She teaches at the University of British Columbia and Emily Carr University of Art
+Design. She can be reached at: [email protected]
________________________________________
the fifty fifty arts collective is comprised of individuals living and working on unceded and occupied First Nations Territories, specifically the lands of the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations, as well as the W̱SÁNEĆ, Sc'ianew and T'Souke First Nations.
The programming space itself is situated on Songhees and Esquimalt Territory but engages with individuals and communities across Turtle Island.
As a collective we endeavor to deepen our own understandings of how we are implicated in the history and in the present ongoing project of settler colonialism. As members of the fifty fifty arts collective we continually responsibilize ourselves to the complex kind of space that is the fifty fifty which hosts and facilitates the dissemination of the ideas and work of others.
________________________________________
Accessibility Information:
The entrance to the fifty fifty arts collective is wheelchair accessible, however the door is not automatic and we have no washrooms on site. A more comprehensive statement regarding our accessibility is in progress, specific questions or requests regarding accessibility can be sent to [email protected]
Exhibition dates: May 24-June 16
Performative Artist Talk: June 16th, 5pm
What to do with the intense human desire to relate to the other, in a world where certain modes of relation have been co-opted into the order of the knowable? Is it possible to build a political discourse around the notions of care and hospitality for the other when there is a demand on bodies to focus on their projected self-preservation?
Works in this exhibition search for ethics of agency within existing and abolished frameworks of care, solidarity, hospitality, accountability and perpetuation. The eruption of Gezi protests in Turkey in May 2013 and the unfolding of a variety of civil and state tactics that continually ask for the reorganization of boundaries between collective and individual, symbolic and actual, risky and stable; “becoming a mother” and being placed in a general economy of maintenance as well as caring for a singular creature who has found itself suddenly gravity-bound; and the slow, ongoing evolution of the animal gut neither towards the mouth nor the anus; are among many of the processes that have influenced the motifs in the exhibition. These motifs— collection of items that share affinities with but don’t entirely correspond to memories, metaphors and design components in Damla’s practice— unevenly spread across the works.
A series of monotypes combines an accumulative drawing process with the instant act of pressing down to make the prints, featuring motifs formalized in repeated spatial configurations: young ferns on grids; conversation sets on
spirals; i, h, o, p, e, y, o, u, a, r, e, w, e, l, l on quadrants.
The exhibition also features large scale drawings made with dyes of various concentrations and states of exhaustion as well as inactive solutions prepared from the indigofera tinctoria (the “true indigo”) plant. Drawings are produced
with a combination of vertical actions (dip-dyeing, dripping, capillary action) and horizontal actions (puddling, spreading). Influential is the use of vocabulary in indigofera’s colonial history and its contemporary craft applications — in referral
to the eruption of the Indigo Revolt, appraisal of dye cakes, the disappearance of woad (the “weaker blue”) from cultivation, or revival an exhausted dye vat, among many — which produce an interesting confusion among potency, authenticity, opacity, vividness, solubility, stability and resilience.
Damla invites you to a performative artist talk that will take place on the closing day of the exhibition. She will use anecdotes, descriptions and other rhetorical devices to search for things that have fallen through between the visible and the invisible in the process of the exhibition.
Damla Tamer is a visual artist born in Istanbul, Turkey who currently lives in Vancouver, Canada. She is an active member of artist-run Dynamo Arts Institution, and the Vancouver-based artist mothers collective Art Mamas. She teaches at the University of British Columbia and Emily Carr University of Art
+Design. She can be reached at: [email protected]
________________________________________
the fifty fifty arts collective is comprised of individuals living and working on unceded and occupied First Nations Territories, specifically the lands of the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations, as well as the W̱SÁNEĆ, Sc'ianew and T'Souke First Nations.
The programming space itself is situated on Songhees and Esquimalt Territory but engages with individuals and communities across Turtle Island.
As a collective we endeavor to deepen our own understandings of how we are implicated in the history and in the present ongoing project of settler colonialism. As members of the fifty fifty arts collective we continually responsibilize ourselves to the complex kind of space that is the fifty fifty which hosts and facilitates the dissemination of the ideas and work of others.
________________________________________
Accessibility Information:
The entrance to the fifty fifty arts collective is wheelchair accessible, however the door is not automatic and we have no washrooms on site. A more comprehensive statement regarding our accessibility is in progress, specific questions or requests regarding accessibility can be sent to [email protected]
