In her recent oeuvre, Meltem Sırtıkara designs fields of experiment to explore symbiotic possibilities, making the objects of nature and culture float in a single network with space as one of its constituents. Departing from the question of how we shall live, “A House” showcases a fragment of the remarkable transformation Sırtıkara’s art is currently undergoing. The exhibition rearranging the gallery space as a house carries important traces of the artist’s upcoming tendencies.
In this house, the “objects” and the “paintings” establish effortless relationships free from semantic hierarchies, independently of all kinds of impositions. The spatial configuration showing no interest in solidifying for persuasiveness almost comes alive as the viewer joins the game in a position of both “the seer and the seen” as described by Merleau-Ponty; going through “embodiment”, it begins to inhale and exhale and to move. The inside-outside dialectic disappears. The house’s “outside” in the paintings and the painting’s “inside” looking towards the house constantly exchange positions. As the associative networks of the external house fill the mind or the house of the self, the “embodied mind” is forced to step outside.
Art’s premises also get their share of the artist’s “sailing out to the ocean” game that has been ongoing for a while. The house’s paintings are free to assume any role as they please, starting with “the tableau decorating the house’s walls”, “the window opening to the outside world” and “itself in all its glory”. Around them, objects continue to live without challenging the painterly surface while also not being crushed by it. The fact that they consist of canvas cloth directly attached to the wall surface adds further uncertainty to their role. They neither submit themselves to the domination of the painting treating the wall as a neutral carrier for its masterly optic illusions, nor to that of installation art and its spatial appetite declaring the painting’s death. After all, this is a place where one does not have to dominate the other in order to exist.
If they can do it, why cannot we? In Sırtıkara’s oeuvre centered on relationships, “A House” marks the moment when a state of “safety” replaces the tension based on dialectic. The exhibition signals that Sırtıkara’s journey from now on will be dominated by this sense of security.
İpek Yeğinsü 2023
In this house, the “objects” and the “paintings” establish effortless relationships free from semantic hierarchies, independently of all kinds of impositions. The spatial configuration showing no interest in solidifying for persuasiveness almost comes alive as the viewer joins the game in a position of both “the seer and the seen” as described by Merleau-Ponty; going through “embodiment”, it begins to inhale and exhale and to move. The inside-outside dialectic disappears. The house’s “outside” in the paintings and the painting’s “inside” looking towards the house constantly exchange positions. As the associative networks of the external house fill the mind or the house of the self, the “embodied mind” is forced to step outside.
Art’s premises also get their share of the artist’s “sailing out to the ocean” game that has been ongoing for a while. The house’s paintings are free to assume any role as they please, starting with “the tableau decorating the house’s walls”, “the window opening to the outside world” and “itself in all its glory”. Around them, objects continue to live without challenging the painterly surface while also not being crushed by it. The fact that they consist of canvas cloth directly attached to the wall surface adds further uncertainty to their role. They neither submit themselves to the domination of the painting treating the wall as a neutral carrier for its masterly optic illusions, nor to that of installation art and its spatial appetite declaring the painting’s death. After all, this is a place where one does not have to dominate the other in order to exist.
If they can do it, why cannot we? In Sırtıkara’s oeuvre centered on relationships, “A House” marks the moment when a state of “safety” replaces the tension based on dialectic. The exhibition signals that Sırtıkara’s journey from now on will be dominated by this sense of security.
İpek Yeğinsü 2023