Bringing together Ani Çelik Arevyan’s recent and earlier works with contemporary interpretations, her solo show Transparent Shell opens on Friday, February 25. An installation also takes place besides the artist’s photographs in the exhibition that enable the viewer to see the elements which shape her works such as the use of light, concept of duality, the identicalness between plants and human body, and the repetition of specific materials.
“In my photographs, I like to make analogies between plants and the figure as the expression of human body.” Summarizing her choice of images with these words, Arevyan uses the light as the source of her compositions. The artist reflects her interest in sculpture and dualities that can be observed in her past series, and the multiple images that she creates by the use of similar materials with light and movement by using the metaphor of a “transparent shell” in this context.
Reminding primarily the concept of time with the scenes Arevyan creates using plants and figures, the artist’s Overlay series stands out by bridging the distance between the present and the past by combining photographs that have been in her archive for more than thirty years. Images that become layered and transparent with the overlapping diapositives become one body by turning into single photographs with their borders constantly pushing their frames. In this series of the artist, who combines today’s knowledge with her own processes by looking at the past, it is remarkable that the figures fly around and the boundaries become increasingly blurred, giving a sense of appearance and disappearance. In the series, Flower with Mesh, where the flower called “protea” is in motion on a high-contrast black background, the folds formed by the material surrounding the flower resembles a winded body and the motion of a dance. Along with the photographs, a three-meter installation, which Arevyan named as Protea, the artist reconstructs one of her maquettes for the first time in three dimensional form and transforms it into a sculpture that gains its own space: “...I consider my still life works as photographic sculptures. Since they appeared on two-dimensional surfaces until now, these sculptural forms had an imaginary quality. In Protea, including the object blowing from the photograph in my presentation solidifies the sensation I try to deliver. Protea wants us to take a fresh look at the environment that is irreparably damaged by us as we witness its extinction.” This plant, which takes its name from Proteus who represents shape shifting in Greek mythology, reveals this hidden meaning of its name for the artist in the exhibition space.
The metaphor of a “shell” becomes visible through the materials used by the artist from the past to the present in the exhibition that questions all interconnectedness with nature, death and life, as well as the poetic and enfolding effect of a shell. The fiction, which includes contrasts such as transparency – opacity, protection – liberation, light – dark, also establishes sensitive connections between Arevyan’s individual past and present.