'30 Faces', 2024, Mold spores and growth Polaroid image transfer, mounted on boards, 6x6" each

In '30 Faces,' participants actively engage with the artwork through the contribution of their unseen microorganisms. After capturing their Polaroid portraits and collecting microbial samples from their bodies and living environments, I reconstruct their images using the microorganisms they coexist with. Each participant’s unique microbiome transforms their photograph into an evolving new reality. As these microorganisms become visible through distinct colors and organic forms, the interactions among these unseen inhabitants shape a new identity for the participants, revealing an intricate, symbiotic relationship between humans and the microscopic world surrounding them.

I use live microscopic mold that leaves physical inscriptions by direct contact on the surface of a paper or board, which creates a living platform. In the Contamination Series, the surface of each panel is laced with graceful, brilliant mold until the entire surface is covered and patterned with circular borders. Then, I assembled these forms and shapes that mold produced to create various visual references for natural and human-impacted landscapes. The forms have similarities to human-induced activities on the landscape. They create territories, boundaries, and borderlines, creating conflicts on the picture surface.

"Balci gives living microbes a place to grow and organize themselves on specially prepared plates. The microorganisms, which normally are invisible to the naked eye, are made visible in these conditions. They create maps of “territories” as they battle for food sources, and their behavior is disturbingly parallel to many scenarios of human conflict. The artist organizes and assembles the landscapes or maps resulting from these natural migrations into abstract compositions limited in tonal variation but elegant in form."

by Claudia Rousseau, Gazette.net, September 18, 2013. 
 


 

"If the artistic process is more interesting than the outcome, as some modernists hold, then the greatest artist is nature itself. Its systems are endless and inexorable, even if the results aren’t always impressive to the naked eye. Take, for example, the fungal experiments of Selin Balci, one of five former Hamiltonian Artists fellows who return to the gallery in “Empirical Evidence.” The Turkey-born Marylander is exhibiting such seemingly inert items as petri dishes that contain slowly evolving mold spores. Far more dramatic is a more artist-directed piece, a five-minute fast-motion video in which molds spread across a world map. It demonstrates the power and scope of the tiniest living things."
Mark Jenkins, October 1, 2021, The Washington Post

"The map-based works present this phenomenon in stark terms, played out as geopolitical headlines ripped from the paper. The World depicts worlds run amok by war, disease or possibly famine. Faint pencil outlines suggest physical boundaries that the organisms push to the brink. Teaming and frothing, they have no “place” to go, and so they turn on one another in a game of brinkmanship, drawing boundaries with battlegrounds to gain the upper hand. The pieces are both eerie and transfixing, haunting yet mesmerizing, and their underlying message could be ignored offhand, if not because we see similar battles taking place today in regions as remote as Syria and as near as Dallas." Eric Hope for East City Art, 2014.