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Park View is pleased to announce “ex oriente lux,” a solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Elif
Erkan. An opening reception will be held Sunday, April 24 from 1-4pm, and the show will be on view
through June 4, 2016.
Erkan’s exhibition centers on a group of concrete sculptures that line the middle of the gallery.
Standing upright on their thin edges, the works follow the footprint of the space along its L-shape.
Operating like a barricade, together they block out a path for their audience, dictating specific
directions of movement along the perimeter, and calibrating their own reception. The works reveal
drawn, undulating shapes that bend forward and backward along their faces. Seemingly left behind
as performative documents, her works are displayed like archeological artifacts of everyday stuff,
portrayed in uncanny shapes and composed of recognizable construction materials. Embedded in
their surfaces are bursts of beige pigments and neon construction levels, which joke by parading as
organic and “balanced” objects.
The title of the show, “ex oriente lux” refers to the classical notion that culture and enlightenment
come from the “East.” Erkan’s sculptures function like containers that address how Eastern concepts
of being and wellness have woven themselves into West coast American culture, and are in turn
utilized as contemporary salves for negativity, fear, and depression. Erkan draws from philosophical
ideas about the self, processing them into sculptural formulas that here, in their completed states,
appear mute or slumped. Erkan works with and against her sculptures’ immediate, robust sense of
force and weight by figuring them into states of exhaustion and weakness, all tinged with pathos.
Her works oftentimes look found, but they are in fact formed and composed according to specific
parameters she sees fit for a context, in terms of sculptural material (in this case, concrete and
plasticine), pictorial content (kale, fish oil, beige pigments), and scale. Erkan’s wall works in plasticine
are cast from junk food containers and bear health food products on their surfaces. The shape of a
plastic cake tray turned on its side begins to look like some sort of semicircle oracle, and placed
alongside a second, looks like a pair of ears or quotations, listening to the concrete works on the floor
or perhaps marking out the space as a section of a larger text or project.