T H E P I L L® is pleased to present Leylâ Gediz’s fourth solo exhibition at the gallery between 28 September — 16 November 2024. Titled Stagehand, the exhibition marks a new chapter in the artist’s research into support structures and processes usually held outside frames of representation, this time with a focus on theatrical production.

In theatre, a stagehand describes the profession of people who work backstage in various roles to set up the scenery, lights, sound, props, rigging, and special effects for a production. Each act in a play takes place within a specific “scene,” which consists of a different set of scenery and props. The curtain conceals a flurry of activity between acts, as one world of painted backdrops, furniture, rigging, and props is replaced by a new one by stagehands during intermission, out of sight of the audience. As the story unfolds, the disappearance and reappearance of the backdrop that frames the play, the characters, and the action, attached to the wooden frames that hold its painted fabric, always occurs in secret. Unfolding through a series of large-scale paintings-as-assemblages that fragment and recompose archival images and support structures from theatre, Leylâ Gediz’s exhibition opens up a space of translation between the processes of painterly composition and those underlying a set change.

Leylâ Gediz approaches painting as a thought process and discursive practice to explore the relationship between figuration and its conditions of possibility. Her process-oriented practice incorporates fragments of everyday life filtered through contemporary image-processing technologies. Her paintings are structural experiments that dislocate and rearticulate the relationship between background and figure, simultaneously deconstructing painting into its constitutive materials and processes and rearticulating it through techniques of assemblage.