Work
Leyla Jamil
Rzayeva
In the process of working with photography and sculpture, I condense my interior gaze and layer it with an understanding of what I have destroyed along the way to become me.
Like Medusa’s head - moving, punishing, and destructive - the internal gaze is a filter and an editor in my life. It grows stronger with habit and turns into a ritual.
I have learned to live with a conditioned complexity, a multitude of actions for safety and survival. Working with installation, photography, sculpture, and printmaking, I am curious to know what I disclose in different environments and atmospheres.
I understand photography as an act of disclosure, giving away and letting something slip in a moment of relaxation or intensity.
In my photography, sculpture and installations I create props and environments that operate at the edges of objects and view points, taking the traditional elements of visual capture - a camera and a tripod - and working with them as individual parts of an atmosphere and gaze.
The presentation of this work imagines visual samples working in oppositions and modalities.
In my installations I see the parts of myself that can stay visible and compartmentalize others into fractions.
What I wanted to do in the projects Backstage and Mixtures was to break myself into pieces, and the irony of coming apart in this way was the creation of an emotional outline to describe a precarious past and a longing for self-possession.