Bridge Books Announces Publication of New Artist Book Title: “River, Red” by Ahmed Ozsever
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Bridge Books Announces Publication of New Artist Book Title: River, Red by Ahmed Ozsever
Bridge Books is excited to announce the publication of a new artist book title, River, Red, by Ahmed Ozsever, acquired for the press by Bridge Editor-in-Chief Michael Workman.
“My work is 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,” says Ozsever. “Time can only be perceived indirectly, we cannot see it, smell, hear it, or feel it. I find 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.”
River, Red is a visual art and research project that observes the space created by natural river migration. The project explores concepts of time as made evident in land, the malleability of human imposed borders, and the contrasting temporalities that can be perceived in nature and those that are human constructs.
In the coming book, Ozsever traverses the space between the current location of the river and the recorded location of the river as of 1923, when the southern bank was legally declared the border between Texas and Oklahoma. Since then, erosion and accretion have caused the river to move by upwards of one mile in certain areas. This differential has incited disputes over private property, state borders, and Indigenous Land. River, Red seeks to visually quantify the space that we are unable to anticipate by documenting both the natural and human-made landscapes that the author encountered while traversing that space. The resulting collection of photographs brings together the remnants of human-made structures, stains left by a receding waterline, and oblique aerial views that show the ascending ages of flora from saplings and weeds at the current shore to old growth far in the distance.
About Ahmed Ozsever
Ahmed Ozsever is an interdisciplinary artist who works in installation, time-based media, sculpture, and photography. His work takes the position that the conditions of the Anthropocene are the result of human’s inability to comprehend time scales that extend beyond ourselves. Ahmed earned a BFA from Herron School of Art and Design at IU Indianapolis, and an MFA from Cornell University. Ahmed is based in Bloomington, IN where he is Assistant Professor of Creative Core (foundations) at the Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture, and Design at Indiana University.
