Indiana artist Ahmed Ozsever to be on display at New Harmony Gallery of Contemporary Art

Source: University of Southern Indiana News

The University of Southern Indiana New Harmony Gallery of Contemporary Art (NHGCA) is proud to present River, Red, featuring photography by Indiana artist Ahmed Ozsever. The exhibit runs March 4 through April 15, opening with a public reception from 4 to 6 p.m. Saturday, March 11, in conjunction with New Harmony Second Saturdays. Gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. 

Ozsever uses photography and data visualization to reflect on ideas of permanence and transformation within the landscape. In River, Red, Ozsever documents moments along the Red River, a river that flows through the western and southern United States. This river, which legally served as a line between Texas and Oklahoma, has shifted and changed over the years due to both natural and human-made factors. Ozsever’s suite of images, along with portrayals of data about the Red River’s moments, allow for an examination of the precarity of liminal borders.  

Photographs in River, Red depict landscapes of the Red River, including natural materials like trees, weeds and grasses. The photographs also focus on the remnants of where the stream was, as can be seen in expanses of sandy dunes—places where the water had carved away at the bank and then receded and cracked and dried riverbed speckled with barren tree branches. There are also human-made structures spotted throughout the photographs, highlighting where bridges, signage and fencing might not serve the purpose they once had. Accompanying data visualizations showing overlays of river movement and metrics of fluctuation give added context to the Red River’s movement patterns.  

River, Red marks ever-present environmental transformations, reminding us that our landscapes are interconnected. An occurrence in one place can affect miles downstream, and arbitrary boundaries can move beneath our feet. As River, Red depicts the dynamic life of river basins, it also reveals intrinsic connections within our ecological and societal structures.  

Ozsever is an interdisciplinary artist who works in installation, time-based media, sculpture and photography. His work embraces architectural anomalies, as well as the hidden histories of a given location. His background in photography informs his recurring interest in the process and the limitations of photographic seeing. Ahmed’s work explores the articulation and perception of constructed temporalities, mediated experiences of land(scape) and the peculiar human traces inscribed in quotidian spaces.  

Ozsever earned his bachelor’s degree in fine arts from Herron School of Art and Design at IUPUI and his Master of Fine Arts from Cornell University. His independent and collaborative works have been exhibited at Pilot+Projects in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; the Charles W. and Norma C. Carroll Gallery at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia; Aggregate Space Gallery in Oakland, California; Monaco in St. Louis, Missouri; Parlour and Ramp in Chicago, Illinois; among others. His public artworks have been exhibited at Loyola Marymount University; Terrain Biennial: Outpost Enos Park; Springfield, Illinois; and the Hapgood-Wright Forest in Concord, Massachusetts. 

NHGCA promotes discourse about and access to contemporary art in the southern Indiana region and is a proud outreach partner of the University of Southern Indiana.   

This exhibition is made possible in part by the Efroymson Family Fund, Arts Council of Southwestern Indiana, and the Indiana Arts Commission, which receives support from the State of Indiana and the National Endowment for the Arts.