Some art and an Artist

The weather finally being glorious and seasonal (although cooling down again tomorrow) I've editioned a street impression. As mentioned, the residency is adjacent to the original Ottoman Bank. It is also here that old currency notes are shredded and something happens to coins (not sure what). This means several times a week armed guards stand over a variety of vans in which the monies are transported. A conveyor sends out coins and bundles of notes from the vans into the bank, then later workers heave huge sacks of shredded paper, whose colour indicates the bills' denomination, back into the vans. The head of our street is blocked off, helmeted police stand watchful and alert with weapons ready, and all is announced with loud buzzers. So much for anonymity.

The shreds often spill out onto the street and Julie has done many works with them, meticulously sorting the tiny fragments by colour and thus by denomination, fixing them to  enlarged mounts, proportionately note-sized. They are beautiful in a minimal textural way. Having admired these works, I naturally wanted to incorporate these neighbourhood identi-stamps, but chose to continue in the same vein as the pieces I did in Budapest in 2011, using the soft sheets of jeweller's wax from Leather Lane:

Pressed onto the street on top of small piles where the shredded notes accumulate in the pavement's irregular surface, the inherent stickiness of the wax picks up the shreds. Warming in today's sun and heat enhances this quality, better securing the bits to the sheets. The central work was done a few weeks ago, the flanking pair today. Will they fade out as well?

Attending a very posh looking gallery (black walls, white ceilings, massive herringbone wood parquet flooring gleaming in an astounding 4th floor flat) where a friend of Anika's and Julie's was exhibiting in a group show, I was mesmerized by her video installation. Fourteen variously sized tv sets showed the machinery in action at the last operating matzo factory in Istanbul just before it shut down:

Sibel, www.sibelhorada.com/, (these images are grabs from her website) had wanted to do an actual run of matzo, but apparently this would have required dismantling the equipment and cleaning it. Instead, she simply ran thick paper through the machinery, thus imprinting (blind embossing actually) it with the distinctive perforation pattern seen on matzo. While I met her at the PV and chatted briefly, most of this information came from this article: 'The Phantom Matzo Factory'

The sound from the video was gently soothing, a small cacophony of distant machinery, like a flock of distant cooing doves.

 

Thanks to the video produced by Pilevneli Projects from which I extracted this clip. The full exhibition can be seen on their website here Pilevneli project.com