Exhibits & Events

In new paintings, rugs, and works on paper, Isabelle Schipper and Basak Kilicbeyli complicate what it is to be perceived. Wittily exploring gender and how it is performed, embodied, and mythologized, their artworks prompt a breakdown between subject and object, active and passive, watcher and watched.

Both artists play in the archetypes that would not only mark a person as one thing or another but press them into an ideal form. Basak Kilicbeyli queers and deconstructs mythic archetypes, turning gods into objects and objects into gods in the process. Isabelle Schipper works with constructions of femininity: makeup, dolls, and arching mouths. Lipsticked girls peep out from high towers. Sometimes they melt into the architecture itself, barricading themselves in and shutting spectators out. Schipper’s paintings fix the viewer with a stare that sometimes weeps and sometimes tricks. Kilicbeyli’s invocation of the nazar or evil eye wards away the ill intent of an onlooker as much as it dazzles and adorns. This is a gaze that gazes back.

“Lookout” is a warning but also a faithful friend, a sentinel at her post, a battlement.