Reading the Depth Record Closing Reception / Artist Talk

The elements that coalesce to create land extend beyond our daily experience of time, our entire lifetimes, and in many cases humanity. This time scale, or ‘deep time,’ is imperceptible except through symptomatic evidence, that encapsulates the result of hundreds or thousands of years of cumulative, glacially slow activity. One such example is geological core samples. These cylindrical extractions of bedrock that contain cross sections of rock and mineral that can extend hundreds of feet beneath the earth’s surface. When viewed as such, one can see layers of sediment, surprising color gradations and patterns, and contrasting textures from the land beneath. They suggest permanence where long sections remain intact visually articulating their immense density, and fragility where shale crumbles or hairline fractures make them appear glued together like a broken vase. Each sample is a rolled scroll, its full text concealed within.

Reading the Depth Record is a re-visitation of the sites where core samples have been taken. I visited the precise coordinates from where the samples were initially extracted, then traversed the surrounding area in concentric circles collecting all traces of human presence. Every measured foot of the core, is a one-foot radius from the site. The collected detritus then became aggregate in creating my simulated cores to serve as an index of the sites. Shallow Cores therefore imposes the material of the day-to-day on a visual form associated with deep time. It translates a site that functions to study the distant past to one that indexes the recent past.

Ahmed Ozsever is an interdisciplinary artist who works in installation, time-based media, sculpture, and photography. His work is geographically focused and responds to the spatial anomalies, as well as the hidden histories of a given location. 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. Ahmed earned his BFA from Herron School of Art and Design at IUPUI, and received his MFA from Cornell University.

Ahmed’s independent and collaborative works have been exhibited throughout the US at venues including the South Bend Museum of Art, the Indiana State Museum, HF Johnson Gallery at Carthage College, Gallery19 in Chicago, Pilot Projects in Philadelphia, PA, station923 in Ithaca, NY, and Site109 in New York City, among others. Ahmed’s public artworks have been exhibited at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, CA, the 2017 Terrain Biennial in Springfield, IL, and the Hapgood-Wright Forest in Concord, MA. He was an ACRE resident in 2017, and was a CORE Artist in Residence at Chicago Art Department in 2018. Ahmed is based in Bloomington, IN where he is Assistant Professor of Creative Core (foundations) in the Eskenazi School of Art Architecture and Design at Indiana University.