Hayal Pozantı ('04) at "Painting in Four Takes" exhibition
2004 Visual Arts and Visual Communication Design graduate Hayal Pozanti’s paintings at Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and the exhibition was reported in New York Times. Our graduate Hayal Pozanti’s “Deep Learning” pits technology against the human mind in the exhibition “Painting in Four Takes”.
Hayal Pozantı - photo: Logan Bellew
Hayal Pozanti is among our graduates whose works were displayed at the Reunion exhibition in Sakip Sabanci Museum in 2015.
Hayal Pozanti pits technology against the human mind with “Deep Learning”. Pozanti’s paintings and digital animations that she created for Aldrich Museum are composed of characters from the 31-symbol alphabet that she created called the “Instant Paradise”. Like anthropomorphic hieroglyphs, combinations of ciphers frolic across her canvases, spelling out numbers that refer to data on human attributes that Ms. Pozanti unearthed online. For instance, the source material of her “One Hundred Twenty Two” painting is the number of dreams a person has in a month and another painting called “18”, it is the number of different human smile variations.
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Hayal Pozanti’s “Sixty Seven” Credit Chad Kleitsch
Initially Hayal Pozanti’s work was mainly digital, she was working on images appropriated from the Internet. Amy Smith-Stewart said “She wanted to make tangible things” about Pozanti, who was propelled to painting by the need to bring tactility into her practice.
Pozanti’s palette combines black and white with patches of color. Smith-Stewart said that “She uses colors you would find on a digital color picker against more natural colors that she hand-mixes”.
On three monitors suspended from the ceiling, Pozanti’s characters stream horizontally and vertically, depicting transcriptions of conversations that she conducted with chat bots in English and then translated into “Instant Paradise.” Accompanying them is Pozanti’s reading of the text in the phonemes of her lexicon. Her voice sounds robotic, except for brief spurts of giggling, “emotive sounds that she added to make it feel more human,” Smith-Stewart said.
For the first time in more than 20 years, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum is filled exclusively with paintings. “Painting in Four Takes” presents concurrent solo exhibitions of four contemporary painters: Steve DiBenedetto, Hayal Pozanti, Julia Rommel and Ruth Root. Each artist has a distinctive toolbox of motifs and methods, resulting in works that are wildly different. But considered together, the shows attest to the flourishing of painting in a culture that is saturated by digital images, and to the expressive power of paint applied in all its variations by the human hand.
“In this virtual age, there is a hunger for the physicality of painting,” said Richard Klein, the exhibitions director at the Ridgefield Aldrich Museum and added “These are all works that you can’t completely understand unless you are standing in front of them.”
The main goal of “Painting in Four Takes” is, just like the name implies, to present four separate painting shows together. Richard Klein said “We’re not trying to make some overarching point about the state of contemporary painting” and added “It’s impossible to do that. Instead, visitors can immerse themselves in the individual exhibitions. These are significant singular artists. We’re giving people four opportunities to have a meditative experience seeing their work in depth.”
“Painting in Four Takes” exhibition will take place at Aldrich Museum in Ridgefield until April 3rd.