26 Aug 2015

CLOSER | Installation view | 2015 | Sculpture , Mixed media, film

Closer | Installation view | 2015| Guitar blue neon light, Embrodiary cowboy daddy










Cowboy daddy at Arena | 2015 | Acrylic on shiny card paper




Cowboy daddy telling the stories | 2015 | Acrylic on shiny card paper



Elvis Presley cowboy daddy | 2015 | Acrylic on shiny card paper



Cowboy probs | 2015 | Acrylic on shiny card paper
Closer Film still | 2015 | 6' 17" min | Single screen






 
Cowboy Daddy Outfit | 2015 



















 
The past is not simply there in memory, but must be articulated to become memory. The fissure that opens up between experiencing an event and remembering it in representation is unavoidable. Rather than lamenting or ignoring it, this split should be understood as a powerful stimulant for cultural and artistic creativity. The temporal status of any act of memory is always the present […]
Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: marking time in a culture of amnesia 1995

How can we construct, and reconstruct our own pasts? How can that creative exploration of the gap between past and present be used to change the way we feel about it? Can we use it as a way to heal?
Cowboy Daddy is a poignant and moving re-staging of a past. Cinarel re-imagines and dramatises his memories of his father in both a way of examining the gap between past and present, and also a way of closing that gap, and a form of closure. He re-stages the past to create a dreamy, filmic version of not how his memories of his father were, but of how he would like them to be, as a process of healing. Ghosts of objects theatrically haunt the space, which is a both a film set and a stage.

Cinarel's paintings are imagined memory fragments, storyboards of an imaginary spaghetti western, of an imaginary past where the presence of violence and an absence of love become a beautiful dreamlike sequence of film stills. The drama played out is a theatrical re-narration of Cowboy Daddy, a re-performance of the past where Cowboy Daddy and Cowboy Child have a new relationship, a new past. They go camping, ride horses, they hug.

Cinarel re-authors his memories, through haunted re-stagings that bring the ghost of his father through his words and material objects into this space in the present, in order to create a new space of archetypal love between father and son.

Jeanie Sinclair
Associate Lecturer & PhD Researcher, Falmouth University
Research Fellow, St Ives Archive

Installation sound by  Katri Paakkari

Film sound by S J Blackmore



1 Aug 2015

CLOSER


CLOSER 
OPENING EVENT 
7 AUGUST 2015
ARTIST IN RESIDENCY @BACKLANEWEST
9 BACK LANE WEST, REDRUTH, CORNWALL
6:30 - 9:00
ILKER CINAREL




Ilker Cinarel’s work explores the politics that surround the family through the indescribably personal prism of his own childhood tensions where hyper-macho pop culture spilled over into reality. Ilker is still trying to reconcile where he belongs within this masculine dominated culture and context. Questioning the place of intimacy and humour within an overtly masculine context, Ilker playfully makes visible the structures which contain societal stereotypes.

Cinarel’s investigative processes involve both aestheticizing and politicizing his personal experiences and relationship with his surroundings, raising questions that concern cultural identity and the social and political environment that he lives in. In particular, themes around men and masculinity.

The residency at Back Lane West gives Ilker the opportunity to explore the title of his latest works 'Closer'. He is exploring how he can become closer to his father, working with his father's self-appointed ultra ego of the cowboy. Through sexualising this persona he makes empathetic links with his otherwise confusing memories of childhood. He asks the question “did you have a cowboy daddy? ....” and how can you become closer to cowboy?

More information: http://backlanewest.org