Living Color
paintings, photographs & light
Mehmet Dogu

opening:
7-9pm, Saturday March 3
{through April 14, 2012}

My work is about architectural ideas that I explore and construct in a variety of ways other beyond designing buildings. For this exhibition, I am addressing these ideas through photography, paintings and sculptural light pieces.

photography

Photography has always been important to me, trained in my youth by my father, I tend to see my experiences episodically, in quanta of images. Likewise, photography has always been important in my architectural work to not only document sites and materials and my finished products, but more importantly, it is also a spatial event in and of itself. The space that photography creates is a medium I have been working with since I have been making pictures. Pictures always fascinate me because they not only capture something we think we know, but they create a whole other world that can have a space all to its own.

“portflio” contains photographs mounted on reclaimed ink-print tests of varied and vivid colors. At Poem 88, these will be displayed for the first time as an installation and will blanket the wall – floor to ceiling in 9 panels of 9 pieces each for a total of 81 total portfolio leafs on the wall.

painting

Surface and architecture are essentially linked. Surface is what presents itself to be viewed, it is what contains the space, it is what hides and also reveals. This surface in building is not a static thing – it changes over time, it shows its wear, the weather and its evolving materiality, as do my paintings. Phenomenally, surface can be flat, or dimensional. It can be actual or representational – so how space and line work on a surface is a curious thing to me. I think often to “make that line a beautiful line” and have made hundreds of sketches, water colors, oils, acrylics over time exploring this and the space these lines contain and create. These also involve numbers; counting, rhythm, logic and mystery.

This meditation will be four new paintings about lines, space and color. They will incorporate an ink wash on reclaimed palette panels of roughly 4’x4’ framed with angle iron. I will make saw cuts and scorch the surface of the panels and then apply bright lines of paint into the grooves and float them off the wall.

light

Light and dark, color and space are another architectural area I’ve regularly explored through constructed light pieces. Some of these have been inserted into the architecture and some have been freestanding or hung objects. Though the installation may be different, each affects and creates new conditions of space around themselves.

For Poem 88, I will create two new pieces, one large and centrally located in the space, the other much smaller and tucked in a remote location. These pieces will provide an overall glow to the gallery to subtly color our environment when the ambient light is great and transform the space more dramatically when they become glowing beacons in the night


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