Yasemin Kackar-Demirel: Untethered
Curated by Eileen Jeng Lynch

 The Yard: City Hall Park
116 Nassau Street, Floors 5 & 6
New York, NY 10038

May 23 –August 9, 2019

Opening reception: Thursday, May 23, 6 – 8 pm 
RSVP here 

Viewing hours: Monday – Friday, 9:30 am – 5 pm (check in with community manager on floor 5) and by appointment.
Contact eileen@neumeraki.com

Neumeraki is pleased to present Untethered, a solo exhibition by Yasemin Kackar-Demirel. The artist’s vibrantly colored paintings, drawings, and textile-based work comprise a range of materials, including acrylic paint, colored pencil, embroidery, graphite, spray paint, and watercolor. In her abstracted pieces inspired by architecture, geometry, geography, and pattern making, Kackar-Demirel explores memory, history, architecture, habitat, boundaries, and borders.

With an intuitive and often improvised process without preliminary sketches, Kackar-Demirel embraces the push and pull of the various materials—starting and ending with gestures that form organically, such as pours and splotches. Kackar-Demirel’s work is further informed by her lived experience in urban and natural environments. She incorporates architectural features of interior and exterior spaces, such as facades, lighting, and ceiling beams, from the photos she has taken. She prints select images on transparencies and then incorporates these projections on the canvases with embroidery and painting. Treating her work as living, breathing spaces that come together and break apart, Kackar-Demirel constructs and expands narratives—collapsing the past and present.

In the “My Marbled World” series of paintings and works on paper, Kackar-Demirel creates the initial faux marble effect by dipping the canvas and paper into swirls of ink and water. She then pours acrylic paint and adds gestures with marker, flashe paint, and spray paint. She welcomes chance when she releases the paint as well as keeps the residue that is left from the marbling process. Even though the process is additive in materials, Kackar-Demirel breaks down, forms, and reforms fragmentations resembling natural landscapes, such as fields, as well as architectural structures in the cityscape.

In her “Gap” series and select works on paper, such as Taking you with me, Kackar-Demirel utilizes spray paint, linocuts, and cut-out shapes of her paint palettes that are transferred to block prints. Her “Forget me not” series focuses on smaller, more intimate abstracted canvases. In her “Thread Paintings”, such as Broken Bridges, Kackar-Demirel applies detailed stitching on her painting rags—which had once been domestic textiles (e.g. old dinner napkins, handkerchiefs)—allowing the paint daubs and stains on the fabric to guide her embroidery of a stimulated, energetic scene. In her most recent works on paper, such as Release me, she juxtaposes large masses of color with intricate threaded areas that resemble geological features and architectural components.

Kackar-Demirel’s work examines land issues, geopolitical and perspective shifts, and transiency—conflating space and time. She notes that we are continuously evolving as we move through space, and her work explores these physical, mental, and emotional confrontations. Kackar-Demirel questions: “How do I take up space here? Do I belong, feel safe here? What will stay with me when I leave? Who will I be when I exit?”

About the Artist
Yasemin Kackar-Demirel was born in Istanbul, Turkey and lives in Westchester, New York. She has had solo exhibitions at Mooney Center Gallery, The College of New Rochelle, New Rochelle, NY (2011), C.A.M. Gallery, Istanbul, Turkey (2010, 2008), Courthouse Gallery, Lake George Arts Project, Lake George, NY (2008), and McLean County Arts Center, Bloomington, IL (2007), among other venues. Group exhibitions have taken place across the United States as well as internationally in Israel, Italy, and Turkey. Kackar-Demirel earned her MFA and Museum Studies Certificate from Northern Illinois University (2004) and her BFA from Mimar Sinan University, Faculty of Arts, Istanbul, Turkey (2001).  
yaseminkackar.com
@yaseminkackardemirel

Neumeraki
Founded in 2016 by Eileen Jeng Lynch, Neumeraki collaborates with artists, organizations, and galleries on curatorial, consulting, writing, and editing projects. Jeng Lynch works with artists on career growth and development and has curated exhibitions in galleries and nonprofit institutions, including LMAKbooks+design, Sperone Westwater, Lesley Heller Workspace, Dorsky Gallery Curatorial Programs, Garis & Hahn, and Radiator Gallery. Jeng Lynch is also the Curator of Visual Arts at Wave Hill, where she organizes solo exhibitions by emerging artists for the Sunroom Project Space, co-curates shows in Glyndor Gallery, and is involved in all aspects of visual arts programming.
neumeraki.com
@eileenj8

The Yard
Founded in 2011 by Morris Levy and Richard Beyda, The Yard is a revolutionary, shared office space that allows driven professionals to work together in an innovative community. The Yard provides month-to-month memberships for private offices, private desks, and co-working spaces in 14 designed locations in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. The community comprises more than 2,000 companies and thousands of members across all locations. Members have access to state-of-the-art conference rooms, beautiful breakout lounges, monthly networking events, rotating art gallery installations, and hundreds of business amenities.
theyard.com
@theyard