IŞIK KAYA
Işık's lens-based practice explores the ways in which humans shape the contemporary landscape. She focuses on traces of economic infrastructures to examine politics in built environments and how man’s dominance over nature finds its manifestation in everyday architecture. In her work, she erases the physical distance in between existing structures and creates dense compilations of industrial fragments to construct new landscapes that look both alien and familiar at the same time. These fragments transform into symbols of the conundrum of progress and self-destruction that is inherent to capitalist societies. By framing her subjects exclusively at night, she aims to accentuate the artificial and uncanny qualities of urban environments.
CRUDE
Video installation & Heliographic prints using tar collected from La Brea Tar Pits, 2021No other nation consumes as much oil as the United States, which accounts for more than 20% of global consumption annually. The hunger for this resource has defined the nation's politics for decades and the efforts to secure its flow are inscribed in the landscape. In Los Angeles and its vicinity, home to the country's largest urban oil field and refineries, America is being transformed into a bizarre engine, the pacemaker of the passing age of petroleum.
SECOND NATURE
Photographic series, 2020-ongoingThe 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 are a “societal preference for ‘fake’ aesthetics over ‘ugly’ reality” (Amy Clarke).
MONUMENTS
Video & photo installation, 2019“The dictatorship of the automobile—the pilot product of the first stage of commodity abundance—has left its mark on the landscape with the dominance of freeways, which tear up the old urban centers and promote an ever-wider dispersal.”
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle
Monuments show a world that seems alien, although they spring from perhaps the most common experience one can have in Southern California: driving a car. These infrastructures of speed and power form gigantic concrete layers that dominate the landscape. They are the “accidental” monuments of the economic system we live in: a system that ignores the environment and human needs in order to provide itself with maximum efficiency.
The sound in the video is a recording of seismic airgun blasting used for mapping oil and gas reserves under the seafloor.