Rupert Nuttle
No. 108 – fall 2014

Derya Akay: Material Hangings, Hangouts


Derya Akay’s work begins at the point where medium distinctions —familiar terms such as sculpture, photography, painting or installation— dissolve, intermingle and flavour one another. The languages of cooking and gardening—open-endedness, warmth and socialization— characterize Akay’s approach to art-making. As a result, the confines of the traditional gallery space fade away, and the meandering networks of memory, trace and collective experience take over. Oscillating between a strong situational awareness on the one hand (manifested in works such as Banff Blues and Gardenstrasse that blend social experiment and documentation), and an equally strong material awareness on the other (the glazed ceramic Blobs, or the ongoing Scans, for example), Akay negotiates the philosophical interstices between art-as-object and art-as-event.


 

The tendency toward the provisional is what I find most interesting in your work. Your objects maintain a fluid reciprocity with their immediate surroundings. I’m thinking of  Banff Blues, for instance, or the rooftop Gardenstrasse, both of them shifting constellations, which took place outside the gallery. How would you situate these works/actions relative to the traditional exhibition model and its investment of value in the art object as such?

Derya Akay: Banff Blues came out of a residency I was doing at the Banff Centre in 2010. On one of the first days, as we were taken on a tour around the Centre, I came across a blue chroma key curtain. I initially borrowed the curtain for a still life, but then realized how large it was and


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