The final senior studio show of the academic year concluded with work by Iz Oztat and Jamie Taylor. Oztat, originally from Izmir, Turkey, attended high school in Istanbul, and came to the U.S. for college. Oztat’s work discussed her position as a temporary resident alien in the U.S. and is almost entirely object-based. Taylor’s work presents the viewer with objects that discuss the concept of making time visible. While the works by both artists are object-based, the two approached art from different conceptual viewpoints.

Oztat’s interest in materials specific to American and Turkish culture led her to produce a variety of objects. In her piece The Flag (2005) Oztat re-makes an American flag that she purchased in Brooklyn, New York. The flag hosts American red and white stripes and white stars against a blue background over which she paints in encaustic, a material that American painter Jasper Johns used in his paintings of flags. Oztat inserts symbols of the Turkish flag, a white crescent moon and a star, onto the American flag.

The eagle, a well-known American symbol of liberty and justice, is placed into the flag’s lower left-hand corner. The eagle’s eye is replaced with a Turkish “evil eye,” a superstitious object in Turkish culture that is placed in the home to keep evil spirits away. Below the flag reads the slogan, “America – Love It or Leave It,” in beaded letters. While the flag combines elements of American kitsch culture and Turkish folklore, this logo incorporates the element of Native American beading. By embracing multiple cultures, Oztat suggests the idea of a melting pot.

Oztat also incorporates material aspects of American culture into her work. She glues parts from a plastic raft onto the flag. Her interest in plastic as a material surfaced when she came to America. She sees plastic as very American in the sense that it is easily manufactured, modified and thrown away. In regards to America, she says that her flag asks the viewer to either love it or leave it. Her work discusses Americanism, consumerism, kitsch culture, Turkish folklore and the place of the immigrant in American society.

Oztat’s strong sense of place and identity does not connect with the themes that her fellow artist Jamie Taylor hopes to capture. Unlike Oztat’s, Taylor’s art seeks to discuss the absence of history and the possibility of materializing time. Though time passes through artists’ hands as they make objects, Taylor wants to discuss time as a concept in and of itself. He is particularly interested in the way in which video can discuss aspects of unstructured time. In his essay, “Time Itself: ‘Nothing,’ or the Return of Video Art,” he explains, “what happens in video art – beginning with its use as a tool to present events themselves, and continuing through its involvement in more phenomenological projects – is nothing, or rather: time and only time.”

Through this explanation, one can make better sense of his piece “Vessel (video- ship),” in which he takes apart a small videotape and places charcoal on part of it. He then presses the charcoaled video tape onto a blank piece of paper in an attempt to elucidate the actual time which the tape would have captured had it been used to film. Taylor presents conceptually intriguing artwork to the viewer albeit in an abstract way. Compared to Oztat’s work, Taylor’s is not nearly as emotionally charged. While Oztat and Taylor’s contrasting ideas produce very different art, both artists express their ideas using objects in the external world.