Jump Cut

The conceptualisation of an image takes precedence over the image itself in Leylâ Gediz’ paintings. Ideas and concepts initiate the artist’s working process, with their origins often in her own past, her childhood and memories, or objects that recall these to the present. Interested in questions concerning the materiality of painting, its association with time, and its place in our lives, she often incorporates into her artistic process the spaces where she produces and displays her works, as well as giving form to her painting within three-dimensional spaces.

The nine-piece installation "Jump Cut" includes the likes of signboards, folding signs and barricades, which Gediz presents as sculptural paintings, alongside the wall pieces, which she sculpts anew by tearing and glueing their canvases. In these five pieces from "Jump Cut" Gediz uses an almost childlike simplicity and restrained aesthetic. The hues of the pegs fastened to the nylon socks hanging on a washing line seen in the painting on one side of a folding signboard turn into abstract strips of colour on the other side. The same strips of colour are replicated along the canvases which Gediz has cut into segments. In one example, she has stretched such strips across the rear side of the frame; in another, they have been woven together like a net, and suspended from the bottom of the frame. Or in another, the painting has been entirely removed, leaving behind an empty frame which displays the same set of colours on its outer edges. Meanwhile, a nearby wooden box overflows with the remains of Gediz’s joyous, childlike endeavours of building and taking apart, and cutting and sticking back together.