Mehves Lelic is an Istanbul-born artist based on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.
She currently serves as interim curator at the Academy Art Museum and is a Photography MFA student at Bard. She received her BA from the University of Chicago and has been awarded the National Geographic Expeditions Council Grant, the Turkish Cultural Foundation Fellowship, and the City of Chicago Individual Artist Program Grant. Exhibitions include the Rotterdam Photography Festival, Institute of Contemporary Art Baltimore, Filter Photo, Ogden Museum of Art, Cosmos Arles France, and others; and published in Lenscratch, Der Greif, and Aesthetica Magazine, and more.
About ‘On Adornment‘ – words by Mehves Lelic:
My work from the past year explores the relationship between adornment and self-hood and its inherent visual symbolism(s). I am intrigued by the physical signifiers that are often interpreted as the longing for and the rejection of a gaze, and the mitigation of the two opposing sentiments. The immediate association between the medium of photography and spectatorship is where my exploration, and to a certain extent, brooding, originates. Photography is multitudinous; in the very impulse to create, one must acknowledge the act of spectatorship itself. To relay this, I introduce multiplied, diverted or simultaneous spectators in the images. I am interested in exploring that longing to be desired on one’s own terms, able to return a gaze, or to embody a more layered relationship with the spectator. Between these layers are explorations of detrimental sentiments that can accompany desire: violence, control and objectification. The spectator adorns the subject, for better or worse. The subject adorns itself. Elusion and reservation become their own kinds of adornment.
