CONTACT
studio@ay-dan.com
@aydannova
Using the logic of familiar, domestic objects, Aydan’s work finds resonance between symbolic origins and contemporary simulacra. In collapsing the distinction between the two, she opens a third realm for viewing the mediation of reality, memory, and heritage within the contemporary Western landscape. Slipping between dream logic and the pull of nostalgia, influenced by Soviet and American cinema, her work emerges in a kind of twenty-first-century magical realism.
She currently works out of Red Hook, Brooklyn, seeking moments of analog magic.
28 x 28 x 48 in,
2023
Temple of the Eternal Fire explores the devotion to unreachable origins and ‘authenticity’ in a space of contemporary mediation, through a frame of Thirdness. It entangles an electric fireplace–a contemporary simulacra–with the 17th century Zoroastrian temple, Ateşgah of Baku, in Azerbaijan. The temple is home to the ‘eternal fire’ phenomenon (natural gas vents beneath the earth that fuel perpetually burning fires). In my structure, a single brick cast with dirt collected from the site assimilates the primordial with the simulated, collapsing the real and unreal into a third dimension: a reality where fire, the Zoroastrian symbol of purity and truth, is a mechanically induced projection, haunted by the memory of its primordial ancestor.