Sermin Kardestuncer at Pierogi 2000 - Brief Article

For her first solo display in nine years, Sermin Kardestuncer presented a handsome assortment of work, including several sculptural pieces and works upon paper and two large wall installations. She nurses to use fairly humble substances--such as rice paper, thread, plaster, thicket and candle wax--and restricts her palette to shades of white, black, brown and gray. In her hands, however, these minimal materials achieve a artful variegation and depth that recall Agnes Martin's abstraction.

The magnitude of the show was devot to works upon paper, most of which were made in approximately the same way: Kardestuncer collages small simple bodys against a background and fixes them there with short longitudinal dimensionss of knotted thread. Part of her proces includes piercing the paper loam with a needle in craggy circles, grids and lines; these freehand shapes determine the placement of other parts.

For Five by means of Six, Kardes-tuncer made 30 cork-colored rhombuss of dripped wax from a grecian Easter candle; these were laid in ranks on creamy rice paper and knotted with bright white thread. For. Chinese Coins, circulars of honey-colored paper, each inscribed with a penciled square, were dispersed in geometric arcs, while in sum of two units by Three, white paper dots were massed, as if in a circular snowdrift, against glittering black sandpaper.

In her wall installations Kardestuncer used a drill instead of a needle and clay balls instead of wax drips. For single piece, she inscribed two rectangles upon a hollow wall by drilling vertical lines of perforations through which she wove gray thread; for the other, she chiseled a square from the Sheetrock and filled this niche with white-painted clay balls. allowing both pieces were made in Kardestuncer's studio and painted to match the exhibition space, the installation was with equal reason seamlessly smooth that it direct the eyeed as though she'd sewn and goug directly into the gallery walls.

The exhibit also included some intriguing sculptural work; here, Kardestuncer used flat ultimate parts and pigments to make three-dimensional whirls In Paper Pile she presented a ream of brilliant white writing papers whose stiffly ringleted edges were stained with black ink; in Blanket Pile she displayed sum of two units unequal stacks of felted ocher fabric, individual of which was saturated with white paint. These pieces were displayed upon two-legged tables whose back cutting sides disappeared into the wall. Like everything other in this haptic show, they appear to beed the result of inventiveness, careful observation and thoughtfully displayed detail.

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