11 January 2012
'I Really Must Congratulate You on Your Attention to Detail' - new Cooper Gallery exhibition
Photo opportunity: 7pm on Thursday, 19th January at Cooper Gallery, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design. Viola Yesiltaç will be performing at the Preview of her new exhibition.
Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design will next week play host to the first major UK solo exhibition from renowned photographer and performance artist Viola Yesiltaç.
The constantly shifting boundaries between the 'real' and the 'imagined' will be explored in the show at the Cooper Gallery at DJCAD, part of the University of Dundee. Yesiltaç, a New York-based German who studied photography at the Royal College of Art, explores the displacements that operate between photography, drawing, sculpture and performance.
The exhibition will be open to the public from Friday, 20th January until Saturday, 18th February. A special Preview Evening, featuring a performance by the artist, will take place for an invited audience on Thursday, 19th January.
Sophia Hao, Curator of Exhibitions at DJCAD, said, "The Cooper Gallery is extremely proud to be hosting the first solo UK exhibition by this talented up-and-coming New York based artist whose work is both visually poetic and profoundly philosophical.
"It will be a real treat for the audience who will enjoy the contemplative moments offered by Viola's work. It will also be a rare opportunity to experience the acclaimed monologic performance by the artist which should not be missed."
Drawing attention to the materiality of artworks, she considers these boundaries and how they are perpetually in a state of flux. By manipulating photographs, drawings, sculpture and performance, Yesiltaç pinpoints time as the crucial factor in her practice and plays with notions of 'fiction' and 'reality'.
The title of the exhibition, 'I Really Must Congratulate You on Your Attention to Detail', is taken from the television series The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. This drama sees the actor Jeremy Brett take on the role of Holmes. It is in this relationship between the 'real' and the 'fictional' that Yesiltaç's exhibition is grounded.
It is the largest exhibition to date of work by the artist, and features glass sculptures, photographic works and other forms of creative media, which the artist uses to construct and confuse these boundaries and invite the viewer to consider the effects that photography, drawing and sculpture have upon our perception of time and the reality of images.
She was born in Hanover, Germany and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Honoured with a Scholarship by the German National Merit Foundation, Yesiltaç studied with a mumber of pre-eminent international artists for four years at the School of Fine Art Braunschweig.
She received a MFA in Photography at the Royal College of Art London in 2008 and has recently been invited to participate the 30th Sao Polau Biennale 2012. Yesiltaç has exhibited works in solo and group exhibitions throughout major venues in Europe, the United States and China.
'I Really Must Congratulate You on Your Attention to Detail' is the first phase of the Cooper Gallery's Materiality & Metaphysics series.
For media enquiries contact:
Grant Hill
Press Officer
University of Dundee
Nethergate, Dundee, DD1 4HN
TEL: 01382 384768
E-MAIL: g.hill@dundee.ac.uk
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