LOOKOUT
Reception:
Thursday, October 10th, 6-9pm
Gallery Hours:
Saturdays 12-5pm and by appointment
October 5, 2024 - October 26, 2024
In new paintings, rugs, and works on paper, Isabelle Schipper and Basak Kilicbeyli complicate what it is to be perceived. Wittily exploring gender and how it is performed, embodied, and mythologized, their artworks prompt a breakdown between subject and object, active and passive, watcher and watched.
Both artists play in the archetypes that would not only mark a person as one thing or another but press them into an ideal form. Basak Kilicbeyli queers and deconstructs mythic archetypes, turning gods into objects and objects into gods in the process. Isabelle Schipper works with constructions of femininity: makeup, dolls, and arching mouths. Lipsticked girls peep out from high towers. Sometimes they melt into the architecture itself, barricading themselves in and shutting spectators out. Schipper’s paintings fix the viewer with a stare that sometimes weeps and sometimes tricks. Kilicbeyli’s invocation of the nazar or evil eye wards away the ill intent of an onlooker as much as it dazzles and adorns. This is a gaze that gazes back.
“Lookout” is a warning but also a faithful friend, a sentinel at her post, a battlement.
Curated by Addison Namnoum
Basak Kilicbeyli (Başak Kılıçbeyli) is a Philadelphia-based textile artist from Turkey. With a BFA in Graphic Design from Yeditepe University, she ventured into the world of printmaking. Pursuing an MFA at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts further honed her craft in textiles and provided Basak with opportunities to be featured later in exhibitions at DVAA, FRIEDA, Information Space, Off The Wall Gallery, and Sounds About Riso. The Woodmere Art Museum proudly houses one of her rugs in the permanent collection, making her the collection's first Turkish queer woman artist. @basakkilicbeyli
The relationship between objects and non-heteronormativity encourages me to probe gender at a three-dimensional level. Textiles, particularly making rugs, are my primary tool for this. To make my objects, I incorporate printmaking, photography, and found materials as well as embroidering and tufting.
Childhood drawings influence the imagery of my current works. I usually revisit these drawings to create my own mythical figures as well as to recall ancient mythical figures and stories to highlight nonnormative appearances retrospectively. Within various surfaces, gender-ambiguous forms, and figures, I time-travel through archetypes of gender-fluidity, rendering and regenerating their image as a mediator from today.
Isabelle Schipper (b. 1995) is a painter living and working in New York City. She received her MFA in Painting from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2019, her BFA in Painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2017, and she studied at the Studio Art Centers International in Florence, Italy in 2016. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group shows Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. In 2018, she collaborated with Small Editions to print and publish the risograph zine Bikini Girls. Originally exhibited at the New York Art Book Fair (MoMA PS1), this work is now held in the collections of: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Ohio University, SUNY Purchase, The School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, University of Michigan, and Virginia Commonwealth University. @isabelle.schipper
“What was the point of saving herself from having to hear the sounds tick-tocking away in her room, like raindrops on a window, or tears down a cheek, if every hour, on the hour, the chimes downstairs rang out?” - Jenny Diski, The Vanishing Princess
The application of gender is always clumsy. After all, it is a myth. I make paintings teeming with signs and symbols of femininity – puddles of mascara, rouged cheeks, smudged red lipstick, a beauty mark. These shorthands inevitably fall short. They add up to a mimicry, a parody of womanhood, underneath which there is an apparition lurking, peeking out through eyes not designed to see. What does the assumption of these markers do to the soul of a person?