Deborah Semel Demirtaş

Yes, it’s December, and since there is relatively no Christmas and even less Hannukah here in Foça, it’s time to get into the New Year’s spirit, which means…

Resolutions! Now is the perfect time to decide to (as Akbar and Jeff used to say) get back to work!

And what better way to procrastinate getting back to work than designing new business cards!

My first choice was this image (above) from an installation that was part of an exhibit I organized around 10 years ago called “Art Windows”. The exhibit was held in vacant shops in Turgutreis (Bodrum, Turkey), which, sadly, accounted for a depressingly large percentage of the downtown real estate. If I remember right, we had about 20 shops lend us their empty spaces to fill with paintings, sculptures, etc. At the opening, we basically walked around town with the mayor, a city-council member, and all of the local press, as if we were tourists traipsing around with a tour guide. The local tv station showed a clip of the event all summer long, making it some of the cheapest publicity the town had ever seen. And the artwork looked good, I must say. My piece was an installation that occupied an empty shop that was once a grocers and was still filled with dusty jars of fruit preserves and tomato and pepper paste.

As far as these cards go, I’m pretty much sure I need that Dewey quote there, since I want to focus on projects involving art and education. I’m also pretty sure I want something multi-media – wouldn’t want anyone to mistake me for “just” a painter… When I took a browse through some old flash drives, I found this:

Evoking curiosity is a good thing, so I don’t mind that it might be hard to tell from the pic that this is a picture of a group weaving project. Anyone who passed by the “Çatal Ada Art, Culture and Environment” association’s stall at the second-hand market in Turgutreis was invited to do a little weaving. While the other charities were selling used clothing, we tried to have a different art project every week – mainly for kids, but we had adults interested, too. In fact, since we were close to Milas, a big carpet center, I shouldn’t have been surprised when one of the women at the market just took over the project… constructed from scrap fabrics from my brother-in-law’s old workplace. “A fun afternoon was had by all.”

The next choice for cards is from an afternoon of fun with my husband on Çatal Ada, the little island off of Turgutreis that our association got our name from. This time I had tagged along with Harun on a fishing expedition, and as usual, I found something to keep me occupied. Since I hadn’t brought my drawing kit with me, I ended up “drawing” with the trash I found on the island. Basically, I sewed a necklace out of it. (We wouldn’t have enough room in our little boat to have taken it back to the mainland and disposed of it properly, so I figured I’d at least string it all together so it wouldn’t blow away and it would be easy enough for someone with a bigger boat to haul back. I am happy to say, that that is exactly what happened.)

The next choice is from the latest work I’ve done, which was exhibited in a group show in Foça (Izmir) last month. It’s a double exposure (i.e., it’s a Photoshopped version) of an article of clothing that had washed up on the shore outside Foça – along with a lot of other clothing, a torn life vest, and a shredded rubber boat of the kind used by migrants attempting to cross the Aegean from Turkey to Europe. I took the original photos during another fishing expedition with Harun. (I’ve been tagging along much more rarely, and these days I tend to take a camera instead of drawing supplies.) I can’t really put into words the feeling that I had that day (“perverse fascination” seems to come closest, “obsession” might do) – which I guess is why I do visual rather than some other type of art. I spent a long time photographing the various articles of men’s, women’s and children’s clothing that had washed up and been caked with sand, and when I was done, I packed up some of the items in a plastic bag I found lying there and took them home. I had no idea what I was going to do with them, but I just couldn’t leave them there. Somehow, it just didn’t seem right.

The group exhibit in Foça was an interesting experience, because when we were hanging up the work we got into a discussion about how to “hang” the work appropriately so it could be looked at in its best light as a distinct work of art. I had a hard time explaining that I sort of have a problem with all that lies behind that assumption in the first place, and so I sort of gave up – but I was still insistent that the “quadruptych” of 4 photos didn’t need to be on a white wall, that the glass-brick wall of the space was just fine by me. That led to ensuing discussions over the course of the week-long exhibit about whether or not I was making a mistake… and it also led to an experiment on my part whereby mid-week I added a low table on which the washed and folded articles of clothing from the photos were displayed. I’m not sure whether or not turning the work into an installation added anything or not – a discussion with one visitor to the exhibit led me to suspect it might have even taken something away.

I’d actually done a version of the card with a black border rather than a white border first –

and it’s certainly easier to see it here (against the white page), although the white border looks (somewhat) more like a “traditional” business card.

The other card options are more variations on the “pomegranate” theme,

the last one being without Mr. Dewey’s quote. (Did you know he founded the New School of Social Research in NY? I didn’t. Research.

Input, anyone?…