Hunting Season is designed as a hunting ritual about the personal struggle of modern life. Hunting is an impulsive act that has been going on subconsciously since the hunter-gathering times of man, and that our modern consciousness cannot accept. However, at first glance, the hunting ritual, which seems brutal and repulsive, is not a distant action for modern people when it focuses on the purpose of the action.
What makes hunting a ritual is that hunting is repeated as a repetitive action with a long and detailed planning. Hunting is important because, besides being the primary food supply of primitive societies, it satisfies the urge to dominate another creature as a result of a struggle, to recruit power, to overcome. In bison and mammoth paintings drawn on the walls of the cave, handprints painted on the wall always show the traces of a ritual aimed at defeating prey and gaining power. For the primitive hunter, this ritual hunt is for spiritual preparation. Perhaps, as a common action of a group of hunters, the entire hunting process has become a planned ceremonial feature. Big and powerful hunting is the indicator of power and status for the hunter. The collective hunt helps this status impulse to look into a constructive and strong sense of integrity related to sharing, solidarity and a sense of trust.
Primitive life carries the purity and wisdom of nature. Primitive man was able to live in harmony with his impulsive existence in the face of the harsh, cruel rules of nature that responded to this purity with its purity. However, today’s human is alienated from the rules of nature within a synthetic living space. We invented a whole body of artificial values without a harmony balance mechanism that would introduce us to our existence. This sphere of existence keeps us within the boundaries of other people and in a relationship limited to the urge to win and lose. Primitive impulses are in place, but the goal has changed. Hunting no longer has a collective and egalitarian structure as it was 2 million years ago. Because with the urge to hunt, our attention is directed towards each other for power and status, not for other animals in order to find food.
While the works in this project trace the most basic and most impulsive codes of existence for the purpose of survival, they collide with human impressions, the traditional codes of urban life and the images of routine life with the primitive existence of man.
The main structure of the canvas paintings is based on the plastic fiction of the series “Layers of Consciousness”. The complex nature of human emotional states acquired in the Layers of Consciousness are reduced to the more specific phenomenon of hunting and hunt. In essence, this is our reality, which is basically this modern and social individual. Our life is not only between instinct and reason, but between thousands and even countless opposite pairs. The simplest, each of us has different identities. Each of these identities prompts us to make countless decisions a day. We experience contradictory roles, situations, and contrasts, but at the end of the day we are together in the same body as all our existence.
The paintings have a layer-by-layer continuity that prioritizes the complex emotional states and roles of man. In portraits, the transformation of the figure becomes important. In other pictures, the spaces and situations are stacked and intertwined. At this point, the pictures demand an intellectual and visual concentration from the viewer. For example, a banquet table makes sense for people who eat, but with the crocodile that smashes its prey in the river that is superimposed on it. Simultaneity and permeable spaces have a structure that affects each other and deepens the meaning. The people, who exist with fragments of many contradictory life models, and use their limited capacities only to recruit power from others, are the people who are both hunters and hunts in their own world.
The sculptures were also designed based on simultaneous entities. The main problem here was to discover how the matter in the pictures would be captured with sculpture through plastic expression. Because the problematic of the three-dimensional mass as a plastic form does not allow the creation of illusions with superimposed planes or color layers as in the picture. The layered simultaneous images in the paintings turn into group figures with a total meaningfulness in the sculptures. Some sculptures have experiments on the surface that support meaning and color and form. Events such as plot and space are now subject to the rules of the “real” world with three-dimensional “real” space and mass.
Today’s human beings have a mental infrastructure, a spiritual needs, and a complex and dynamic inner world. The problem gets even more complicated when the world is expanding every day. Everything about the world and life has multiple relations. Every dynamic is a complex relationship that is related to another dynamic. The hunting ritual questions the existence in the multiple structure of such a complex whole. Both the hunter and the hunt; It aims to show the presence, neither the hunt nor the hunter, with all its contrasts and chaos.
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