Artist Hayal Pozanti Embraces a Language All Her Have
They fulfilled in 2016 at the Brussels art fair—she was having a gallery clearly show in town, and she went to the fair with a mate. “I saw him, and there was an prompt attraction,” she suggests. Harmon phone calls it “love at very first sight.” Immediately after a 12 months of long-distance commuting between Los Angeles and New York, exactly where she was dwelling at the time, Harmon invited her to occur to LA, and they’ve been collectively ever due to the fact. “He experienced a lovely residence in Highland Park,” she suggests, “with a back garden and palm trees and birds, and coyotes and skunks.”
Her aim was shifting toward ecological issues and local weather-linked outcomes of technological development. “Once I moved to LA, I identified myself in a town that was in very near proximity to the normal environment,” she claims. “I was taking road trips up the coastline and seeing unbelievable manifestations of nature—whales off the coastline and redwood trees that had been hundreds of many years aged.” In 2019, she and Harmon eloped—a nondenominational priestess married them in a circle of redwoods in Big Sur. (Two months later on, they experienced a huge Turkish marriage in Istanbul.)
She began thinking about “what it usually means to be human,” and about encountering the earth as a result of her physique, by means of memories and goals, and forming intuitive responses to the world close to her. This is when she stopped applying acrylic (plastic) paint and started off using oil sticks (pigment combined with walnut or linseed oil). “I wanted to encounter what it feels like to just paint, from my thoughts to my hand,” she describes. “The oil stick enables you to do that.” Pozanti displays me how she mixes the shades, not on a palette, but right on the canvas, employing her fingers. “There’s some thing extremely primal about it. I’m like a cave painter. There’s absolutely nothing involving me and my thoughts and the matter that I’m making.”
The title Hayal suggests “Daydream” in Turkish. “Many Turkish names are also names of matters,” Pozanti suggests. “I have good friends who are known as ‘Love’ and ‘The Sea.’ ” Born in 1983, Pozanti is the only boy or girl of Suheyl (“Northern Star”), a clinical medical doctor with a PhD in healthcare facility administration, and Sengul (“Happy Rose”), a occupation-oriented pc scientist mother. When Pozanti was nine, they moved to Houston, wherever her father concluded his PhD at the Methodist Hospital. He asked if his wife could also have an internship there, and “when they observed on her CV that she could application in 7 languages, they stated, ‘Oh, my God. Can she start tomorrow?’ ” Pozanti remembers. They stayed for three years, so Pozanti could finish elementary university.
Back in Istanbul, Pozanti was enrolled at Robert College—considered the ideal non-public substantial college in Turkey. (Orhan Pamuk and lots of other notables went there.) The lessons ended up typically in English. “From working day a person, she knew so significantly about the US and how to behave all around American teachers,” suggests her classmate Gökçe Günel, now a professor of anthropology at Rice College. Hayal and Gökçe (“Sky Blue”) turned greatest close friends at Robert, and they nevertheless discuss to every other each individual day. (Günel officiated at Pozanti and Harmon’s Istanbul marriage, and Pozanti did the identical at Günel’s wedding the year ahead of.) “She’s a quite imaginative and playful and curious person, who could make herself cry any time she preferred to by maintaining her eyes open as extensive as probable,” Günel says. Pozanti was a day university student, but she stayed late soon after college so that she and Günel, who was a boarder, could cling out.
There were dim spots in her young adulthood, however. The internet was building its way into day by day lifetime, and a good deal of what she observed on it—wounded war veterans, normal disasters—was really disturbing. “I experienced access to all forms of points I’d by no means noticed just before and perhaps should not have been seeing,” she states. “The horror of human experience—I was very drawn to that for no matter what explanation.” When she was in higher college, Pozanti lived via the 7.4 magnitude 1999 earthquake, which took much more than 17,000 life. The Twin Towers fell the calendar year right after she graduated from Robert. She and her moms and dads ended up lying on a seaside in Torba, a seaside village on what is identified as the Turkish Riviera, when “somebody came jogging towards us, shouting, ‘They attacked The us!’ In Turkey, you’re constantly in the center of anything. Which is why this state just cannot really be secure. Forces are pushing and pulling you.”
Throughout her time at Robert, Pozanti experienced taken artwork classes, and just after she graduated, she enrolled in Sabancı University, Turkey’s initial liberal arts faculty, the place she majored in visible arts and interaction style and design. The university was an hour from Istanbul, and each weekend, she and her boyfriend (a jazz drummer) and their friends would vacation to the city and go clubbing, dancing to techno music. “At the clubs, there’d be cigarette girls handing out cigarettes and condoms. I smoked two packs a day.”
