ÖZGE YAĞCI - PLASTIC TOUCH
Özge Yağcı from the "Plastic Touch" exhibition, art direction by Ebru Beyza.
“Plastic Touch” focuses on a purification ritual in the bathroom, one of the most subjective areas of the house. The perception of space from the perspective of the gendered subject frees it from a homogeneous time-space compression and drags it to a "haptic" understanding. In this fluid space grasped by touch, opposite concepts such as dirt, residue, stain, roughness, smoothness, purity, beauty, ugliness, body and soul produce a hybrid discourse. While gendered objects denoted by ge- ometric shapes such as squares, rectangles, and circles evolve into amorphous forms in which ge- ometry is distorted, queer representation makes itself visible in space. While the volume loses its contours, the space constructs the experience of encountering the other on a fluid path.
In the study, it is observed that the poverty of the space casts a shadow on the smoothness ofpurification. The difficulty of cleaning in a poor bathroom is staged with a performative approach developed over the material. The plasticity of the material makes the work an extension of the pro- cess of constructing, perceiving and imagining with touch. Space, on the other hand, gets rid of the eye-centred gaze and transforms into a form that can be constructed by touch, experienced and associated with memory.
The changing rhythm of the daily in today’s urban life has become a situation where domestic ster- ilization is becoming increasingly important. Ceramic; While it stands out as one of the main mate- rials of domestic hygiene spaces in the industrial dimension, it develops an aesthetic context that separates from hygiene and order in the artistic dimension. Ceramic as a material can contain psy- chological references open to artistic interpretation as well as a sociological context. Here, the in- terpretation of the material through the aesthetics of dirt, in a sense, takes the bathroom space to a more livable and present moment and purifies it from the pure sense of hygiene.
The artist, who turned to narratives developed through material in her recent works; She adopts a narrative style that avoids explanation by preserving this approach in her text studies as well. The original text of the series “Pure-Dirt” featured in the exhibition is as follows:
“Look, the bathroom got wet again. Foam and dirt. However, my body is clean. I'm talking about mine, I don't know about yours. Here's some sediment and debris. I look in the mirror sometimes I can't see myself, the brush over there doesn't brush my hair. Fortunately the soap is slippery, the towel is absorbent. What color is the actual dirt, what thickness should the sediment be? How much space should it take for us to believe the stain exists? Witnessing a primeval version of every object, this house must have been beautiful in the eighties. The aging faucets are leaking, and yes, slipping and falling is allowed in this bathroom.”
