Işık Kaya’s work focuses on traces of economic infrastructures to examine politics in built environments and how man’s dominance over nature finds its manifestation in everyday architecture. In her work, she erases the physical distance in between existing structures and creates dense compilations of industrial fragments to construct new landscapes that look both alien and familiar at the same time. Thomas Georg Blank was first trained in cultural and media education focusing on photography before studying art in Karlsruhe and Mexico City. Moving between research and speculative interpretations, Blank explores how spatial and habitual representations of individual and collective imagination affect the world we’re living in and vice versa. Both artists are based in San Diego, California.

Installation view of Crude (2021) from the series Crude Aesthetics by Işık Kaya and Thomas Blank, ©Işık Kaya and Thomas Blank, courtesy of the artists.

This program is supported in part by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; the National Endowment for the Arts; the Max and Marian Farash Foundation; and Joy of Giving Something.