Tracing What the Sea Alters

OPENING RECEPTION: Friday, September 11, 6-8pm at Open Studio
READING & ARTIST TALK: Wednesday, October 7, 6-8pm at Open Studio. Free to RSVP.

Tracing What the Sea Alters approaches the Aegean Sea as both subject and material condition. This maritime world bears the accumulated imprint of layered histories of movement, exchange, and submersion. Composed of patchworked linen, gel transfers, and screenprinted elements, the installation translates this environment through textile, tracing its altered spatial relations.

Across the installation, tonal variations move between luminosity and darkness, at times suggesting a passage from the visible horizon toward greater opacity. Elsewhere, the abstract compositions evoke the dispersed nature of an archipelago, with fragmentation and repetition shifting the surface between pattern and interruption. Water-based gel transfer introduces photographic impressions of the sea onto linen, while screeenprinted inscriptions emerge from place-based motifs embedded in the Aegean’s lived and living archive.These motifs are expressions of the wider ecology of the region, extending beyond human life.

Tracing What the Sea Alters resists bringing these traces into fixed resolution, allowing them to be shaped by the sea’s ecological and temporal conditions. What remains are forms that carry the memory of their own transformation.

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Özge Dîlan Arslan (b. 1994, İstanbul) is an artist based in Tkarón/Toronto. Her practice spans printmaking, image-making, writing, archival research, publishing, and curatorial work. Working through material processes, Arslan explores how memory, movement, and histories of displacement register over time, particularly through surfaces shaped by environmental and historical forces. Water, textile, and print recur in her work as forms that hold traces of passage, transformation, and loss.

Arslan is the founder of ASTAR Editions, an artist-run publishing collective. Her recent projects include collaborations with The Asian Canadian Living Archive (TACLA), including the publication Bodies of Knowledge, as well as research and archival work with the Studio for Media Activism and Critical Thought and SKETCH Working Arts. From 2017 to 2021, she founded and directed Diaspora Express, a Southwest Asian and North African art collective focused on community-led exhibitions and cultural programming. Her curatorial projects include Threads of Resistance (2022) and Changing the Current (2020).

Arslan holds a joint Master of Arts in Communication and Culture from Toronto Metropolitan University and York University, and a Bachelor of Arts in Communication and Media Studies from Carleton University. She is currently a candidate in the Master of Visual Studies (Studio) program at the University of Toronto’s John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design.