Ahmed Ozsever / River, Red

New Harmony Gallery of Contemporary Art, University of Southern Indiana is proud to present River, Red, featuring photography by Indiana artist, Ahmed Ozsever. River, Red will be on view from March 4 through April 15, 2023, with a public reception with the artist in conjunction with New Harmony Second Saturdays on Saturday, March 11 from 4 – 6 pm CT. New Harmony Gallery of Contemporary Art is open Tuesday – Saturday, 10 am – 5 pm CT.

Ahmed Ozsever uses photography and data visualization to reflect on ideas of permanence and transformation within the landscape. In River, Red, Ozsever documents moments along the Red River, is a river that flows through the western and southern United States. This river, which legally served as a line between Texas and Oklahoma, has shifted and changed over the years due to both natural and human-made factors. Ozsever’s suite of images, along with portrayals of data about the Red River’s moments, allow for an examination of the precarity of liminal borders.

Photographs in River, Red depict landscapes of the Red River, including natural materials like trees, weeds, and grasses. The photographs also focus on the remnants of where the stream was, as can be seen in expanses of sandy dunes, places where the water had carved away at the bank and then receded, and cracked and dried riverbed speckled with barren tree branches. There are also human-made structures spotted throughout the photographs, highlighting where bridges, signage, and fencing might not serve the purpose they once had. Accompanying data visualizations showing overlays of river movement and metrics of fluctuation give added context to the Red River’s movement patterns.

Ahmed Ozsever’s River, Red marks ever-present environmental transformations, reminding us that our landscapes are interconnected. An occurrence in one place can affect miles downstream, and arbitrary boundaries can move beneath our feet. As River, Red depicts the dynamic life of river basins, it also reveals intrinsic connections within our ecological and societal structures.

Ahmed Ozsever is an interdisciplinary artist who works in installation, time-based media, sculpture, and photography. His work embraces architectural anomalies, as well as the hidden histories of a given location. His background in photography informs his recurring interest in the process and the limitations of photographic seeing. Ahmed’s work explores the articulation and perception of constructed temporalities, mediated experiences of land(scape), and the peculiar human traces inscribed in quotidian spaces. Ahmed earned his B.F.A. from Herron School of Art and Design at IUPUI, and received his M.F.A. from Cornell University. Ahmed’s independent and collaborative works have been exhibited at the Pilot+Projects (Philadelphia, PA); Charles W. and Norma C. Carroll Gallery at Marshall University (Huntington, WV); Aggregate Space Gallery (Oakland, CA); Monaco (St. Louis, MO); Parlour and Ramp (Chicago, IL); South Bend Museum of Art (South Bend, IN); Indiana State Museum (Indianapolis, IN); HF Johnson Gallery at Carthage College (Kenosha, WI); station923 (Ithaca, NY), among others. Ahmed’s public artworks have been exhibited at Loyola Marymount University, Terrain Biennial: Outpost Enos Park (Springfield, IL), and the Hapgood-Wright Forest (Concord, MA).