Overview
126 Artist – Run Gallery & Studios proudly presents saccades, a solo exhibition of work by Alaz Okudan, in collaboration with Artspace Studios, Galway.
This exhibition presents a body of work which challenges human vision through photographs, oscillating between the incidental and deliberate. Saccadic eye movement is a rapid, unconscious movement of the eyes from one fixation point to another. These take place approximately three times per second and reflect the brain’s search for the data it needs for current purposes. Taking the phenomenon as its conceptual foundation, the work speculates how photography, in both its photochemical and digital forms, mirrors and contrasts our neurological apparatus of seeing. The collection of images plays with scale and temporality, moving between analogue and digital registers of making and looking. It is an attempt to think about what the eyes see, and fail to see, during saccadic movements, and what eventually is registered in memory.
Through the two processes, saccades investigates photography’s dual capacity: to capture what escapes the eye’s restless scanning, and to make connections between seemingly unrelated and disconnected moments.
Alaz Okudan is a photographer and a PhD researcher with a background in media and visual studies. He enjoys looking at infra-ordinary aspects of life that lie beneath the threshold of everyday attention through the lens of visual media. Alaz is interested in hidden and neglected stories from the history of visual technologies. His ongoing PhD investigation at the University of Galway’s Centre for Creative Technologies is a critical examination of accidents and failures of emergent AI technologies. He experiments in both photochemical and digital forms of image-making. Alaz is a darkroom member at Artspace Studios. He lives in Galway and roams the streets of the city.
Exhibition Launch: Friday 21st August at 6pm
Runs: August 21st – September 6th
Open Daily 12pm – 6pm
Curated by Hannah Daly
