July 1, Gul Cajin

“mangled walls, twisted wings”

With the combinations of eclectic materials, Gul Cagin’s projects create urban stories where many social and individual tragedies enfold.  Inspired by traditional visual/verbal/textual storytelling, her work investigates  urban stories within signifying systems to challenge power driven narratives of facts and fictions to reveal what is deleted, excluded, neglected and suppressed.

She works in a cutting away format from one scene to another in non-linear sequences and write/read short scripts about the events and images that she is concerned with. She paints, photographs, cuts, shapes, glues, ties various materials to draw attention to structural possibilities of her medium to arrive at new formations or ordering of images. Her surface are at times being transformed into architectural like entities to become a symbolic form, in a similar sense of “duck” and sometimes of “decorated shed” where ornaments are applied independently to allow psychological, social, personal associations to emerge.  A wooden surface resembling an inflated head, a bird’s wings or multiple broken surfaces with subtle anthropomorphic attributions signal symbolic and psychological perceptions of a world that is in chaos or worlds that constantly clashing, and disintegrating perhaps during a tragic moment. With dynamic structures of planes dangling down, leaning against the wall, floating in the air and lying on the floor, her works spill out of the walls, following multi-planetary baroque impulse in order to segment away from painting’s limitation as a static frame.

Gul Cagin is a Los Angeles based artist and graduated from USC with BFA (1999) and Claremont Graduate University with MFA (2001) in California, USA.