Eyes are everywhere saying “Look me in the eyes,” an exhibition of paintings, sculptures, and multimedia installations by artist Hayv Kahraman currently on view at the Frye Museum in Seattle: human eyes, separate from human bodies but emerging, fruit-like, from small plant stems; eyes tracking passers-by from the looming brick column guarding the interior of the gallery; the eyes are well designed in water color but still directed at the viewer from the uneven texture of the irregularly woven flax paper it is painted on; and the eyes that seem to press the light plastic sheets in a wonderful, comfortable room designed for multimedia installation.
Eyes are a longtime motif for Kahraman, reflecting his experience as an Iraqi Kurd who immigrated to the United States by way of Sweden. Kahraman's eyes show how refugees, both individuals and large populations, are constantly looked at while, at the same time, they are often invisible to society. What exactly determines each result in both art and life, however, is the specific choice and nuances of how and where and in the company of what other eyes are given in their different manifestations.
There is something surreal about being surrounded by the sight of so many mysterious images of the eyes. But there's also something seductive about other rich details in each artwork like the settings of those eyes. Fascinating, for example, is the wash of the marbled background that slowly fills the canvas, and the shocking blue beauty in small paintings like this one. 3 no (2023) revolves around the surface of sensual fibers of woven flax.
Incredibly attractive passions also appear in small groups of almost identical, scantily clad women, whose eyes viewers can only see white swathes of, as they have no iris or cornea. These blind figures populate Kahraman's large paintings as they gather and eat the large egg-like eyes from the plants that bloom on them—as, for example, a wonderful but interesting buffet. Love Me, Don't Love Me (2023). In all of these large paintings, female forms clustered around each other—harems with questions or groups of only girls pursuing odd jobs in the garden.
There are ambiguous symbols between need and desire, on the one hand, or compulsion, on the other, that play with the many shocking visuals seen in the human tableaux in these paintings. Do these animals harvest eyes to replace the missing parts to see—given their seemingly invisible white orbs? Is their use a sadistic pleasure that is blindly accepted? Or is it the acceptance of a particular regime imposed on them as the only possible means of sustenance and survival? For one complex repetition, the eyes are inside Eyeris (2023) are taken from a plant where they grow three female figures as if to replace their missing eyes, a scene that is further disturbed when the plant grows out of the empty eyes of a fourth person placed on the lap. to another. This interweaving of various flora and fauna suggests the uneasy relationship between humans and other living things as a possibility—a theme played out in the painted flax series “Plant Life.”
Each work in “Plant Life” consists of broken flower stems (again, eyes attached like berries to each plant), each held tightly by a piece of medical tape. This intervention serves as a symbol of that field of science that tries to explain and understand well all beings – the suppression of the classification of races, in the case of humans. The textual effects in this series are also teased out by the unbroken threads that hang from the main bodies of the canvases, which magically suggest the living and still alive, as much or more than the isolated plants depicted.
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Currently, in I look at eyes 1-9 (2023), a collection of small square paintings, multiple sets of eyes sit and float above a mask-like face that is also darkly affected by the prominent facial feature of a single, thick brow above both eyes. There is a suggestion here of both a specific physical form (disseminating the particular background of the Middle Eastern artist using a form of self-representation) and a fixation on more extreme gendered features. Another placement of those unibrows in the series alternates in a larger area of the mask images while remaining consistent with other sets of eyes to take a different place down the rest of the face, as if transformed into a bold, pointed mustache. in gender-bending views. Overall, these overlapping portraits produce a humorous effect with dark undercurrents, especially with the fun addition of a single arm and hand-held plant stems painted in a rich layer of stylized gold glitter. And, again, these pictures represent the small stems of plants as examples of the various kinds of connected species from which the parts of the human body seem to grow.
Installation Sizar (2023/2024) stands out in the exhibition, an oddly constructed room within a gallery, with smoke-covered vinyl walls held up by four heavy-metal poles, producing a half-fascinating, half-claustrophobic character. Like some kind of sci-fi vestibule—an airlock or laboratory clean room—this uncertain room adds to the sense of surveillance by whispering, authoritative music playing from a loud speaker, delivered to the inmates. And, as before in the whole show, there are eyes, a lot of them dotting irregularly in straight lines up the middle of the plastic walls, markers of closure but also constantly watching the viewers who are always exposed to the view.
“Look Me in the Eyes” is at Seattle's Frye Art Museum through February 2, 2025.
