Evren Tekinoktay’s collages and paintings are disarming multi-layered images that mix a retro sensibility of female craft traditions with a gritty sophistication and knowing feminist undertone.
Tekinoktay synthesizes a homespun childlike aesthetic with a direct engagement in femininity as a media construct to be bought and sold. Simple cut-out forms and visual icons appropriated from children’s picture books are layered with images of women collected from the media. Other works on paper are just as complex in their iconography, as Tekinoktay deploys paper like paint in a visual dialect derived from the diverse languages of art history and pop culture. Rather than offer a familiar critique of the media’s imaging of woman, Tekinoktay engages in a historical mapping of female identity where overt judgements are not made. Woman becomes a curious creature, at times ambiguous, her image redefined and constructed anew in collage.
Tekinoktay’s latest work explores the area of playful overlap between diametric opposites and the polarity of the sexes, ideas that are collected under the whimsical title ‘A slightly pregnant man’. There is a provoking roughness in the work, using colour and collage to offer only a half-articulated picture of sexuality. The fertile layers of encoded mixed gender imagery include the re-occurring arch of a mouse’s back doubling as a pregnant belly, tempted by a lattice of cheese holes. With her blend of low-gloss magazine images, coy sketches, and paper cut-outs, Tekinoktay creates a newly relevant folk vocabulary with its own set of symbols.