By: Carmen Argote and Zeynep Abes
Curator: Chon Noriega
UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center

Curated by Chon Noriega, UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center will present a special project titled Immersive Distancing by artists Carmen Argote and Zeynep Abes. This exhibition will examine recent media art produced during the Covid-19 pandemic by L.A.-based artists Carmen Argote (Mexico, b. 1981) and Zeynep Abes (Turkey, b. 1993). Zeynep Abes now lives and works in Los Angeles.

These artists address our ongoing cultural and political moment in relation to the body, memory, archival traces, and the urban landscape. Immigration – as both personal experience and socio-political reality – informs their larger body of work. These artists have previously worked in installation and sculpture, drawing heavily on family artifacts and archives as well as explorations of architectural space. Here, they approach media as a visualizing technology that brings their site-based works into an immersive narrative, while they also engage, adapt, and challenge the abstraction inherent in science – but especially digital science.

The production, formal characteristic, and content of these media works were directly impacted by Covid-19 restrictions, moving each artist to develop remote modes of working that blurred the line between production and post-production. Both artists drew upon multiple digital sources: video, photography, and audio recordings.

In Last Light, Argote uses the sights and sounds of her walks across L.A. during the pandemic as the basis for a meditation on dis-ease and destruction. She turns to the foundation for all science – measurement – proposing to measure her body in relation to the scale of the city and the world, but uses the foundation for all art – the hand – as the basis for establishing scale.

In Memory Place, Abes explores three moments in her “fraying certainty” about Istanbul as it becomes an idea more than a place, visualizing this process through point cloud data and photogrammetry that transform video and photographs into 3D environments that recede from the viewer. These environments are impressionistic and partial – with gaps here and there in the scenes depicted, and with portions of imagery coming into sharper focus as they move toward the vanishing point. In both works, the fragmentary nature of the imagery is made immersive by the sound design.