Fikriye Oz
to
Arts + Literature Laboratory 111 S. Livingston St., Madison, Wisconsin 53703
In collaboration with the UW-Madison art department, ALL is presenting a reception for the two winners of their exhibition awards for graduating fine arts MFA students. Sculpture artist Kaylyn Gerenz’s pieces are constructed with everyday objects, like the notecards that she utilizes to comment on documentation. The painter Fik r i y e Oz (work pictured) looks at the ways groups of people are worn down by global capitalism by depicting spaces in decay.
press release: Arts + Literature Laboratory proudly announces two upcoming exhibitions by the recipients of the inaugural ALL Prize, a collaboration with the UW-Madison Art Department, which seeks to provide two outstanding graduating MFA students with an extended MFA thesis exhibition opportunity in the community. Kaylyn Gerenz presents It's This Way Now from Wednesday, March 21 through Saturday, April 21, 2018. Fikriye Oz presents Slow Death from Tuesday, April 3 through Saturday, April 21, 2018. The artists' reception for both prizewinners will be held on Saturday, April 7, 2018, 7-9pm. Gallery hours are Tuesday-Friday, 11am-3pm and Saturday 12-5pm, and by appointment (email hello@artlitlab.org). The gallery will be open by appointment only from March 27-31, 2018.
Fikriye Oz was born and raised in Istanbul, Turkey. She moved to London and then to Los Angeles at the age of 19 to pursue atelier style classical realism figurative painting. Ozmeral received her bachelor's degree at Laguna College of Art and Design and her master's degree at UW-Madison. Ozmeral exhibited her works nationally and received numerous grants and fellowships. Ozmeral currently resides in Madison with her husband and their two Boston terriers.
Oz Artist Statement: “Slow death” refers to the physical wearing down of a population and the deterioration of people in that population that is very nearly a defining condition of their experience and historical existence. The general emphasis of the phrase is on the phenomenon of mass physical attenuation under global/national regimes of capitalist structural subordination and govern-mentality. It takes as its point of departure David Harvey’s polemical observation in “Spaces of hope” that under capitalism the sickness is defined as the inability to work. This powerful observation about the rationalization of health is important part of the story, but it is not the whole story either. Through the space opened up by this concept, I offer a development in the ways we conceptualize contemporary historical experience, especially when that experience simultaneously at an extreme and in zone of ordinariness. Where life building and the attrition of human life are indistinguishable and where it is hard to distinguish the modes of incoherence, distracted ness and the habituation from deliberate and the deliberative activity, as they are all involved in the reproduction of the predictable life.