The University of Illinois Springfield Visual Arts Gallery is pleased to announce, “Five Miles/Twenty-Five Years,” a solo exhibition by interdisciplinary artist Ahmed Ozsever. The exhibition opens Jan. 13 and runs through Feb. 6, 2025. A public reception will take place from 5:30 to 8 p.m. on Jan. 23 at the UIS Visual Arts Gallery. Admission is free and all are welcome to attend.

Aerial imagery often portrays landscapes as neutral, abstract forms–flattening rivers, silos and roadways into two-dimensional compositions shaped by colors, patterns and values. These visual records, archived in both physical and digital spaces, catalog land at specific moments in time. “Five Miles/Twenty-Five Years” juxtaposes this omniscient aerial perspective with human-scale imagery, creating a dialogue between history, intervention and memory.

Ozsever’s photographic and sculptural works engage archival imagery of central Illinois landscapes, focusing on areas reshaped by coal mining and transportation infrastructure. Through this layered visual exploration, the exhibition reflects on the passage of time as evidenced in land, domestic spaces and industrial infrastructure. By connecting geologic time, cycles of capital and everyday human experience, Ozsever visualizes the significant impact of human presence on the environment.

This project is the latest in Ozsever’s works about land, human intervention upon it and how the intersection of land and the human-made can shape our conceptions of both the past and present. It seeks to visualize the symptomatic evidence of the passage of time in land, infrastructure and domestic spaces. These spaces bind together the incomprehensible deep time (or geologic time), to that of capital, and the cycles of consumption and occupancy that comprise and punctuate our day-to-day existence.

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. Ozever’s work explores the articulation and perception of constructed temporalities, mediated experiences of land(scape) and the peculiar human traces inscribed in quotidian spaces. Ozever earned his bachelor’s degree in fine arts from Herron School of Art and Design at Indiana University Indianapolis and received his master’s degree in fine arts from Cornell University.

Ozsever’s independent and collaborative works have been exhibited throughout the United States 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, station923 in Ithaca, New York and Site109 in New York City, among others. Ahmed’s public artworks have been exhibited at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, the 2017 Terrain Biennial in Springfield and the Hapgood-Wright Forest in Concord, Massachusetts. He was an ACRE resident in 2017 and was a CORE Artist in Residence at Chicago Art Department in 2018. Ozsever is based in Bloomington, Indiana, where he is an assistant professor of creative core (foundations) at the Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture and Design at Indiana University.

The UIS Visual Arts Gallery acknowledges support from the Illinois Arts Council Agency. Located in the Health and Science Building (HSB 201) on the UIS campus, the gallery is open from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Thursday. For more information about this and future exhibitions, visit UIS Visual Arts Gallery website.

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Tags: Ahmed Ozsever, Five Miles/Twenty-Five Years, IL, Springfield, UIS Visual Arts Gallery