dreamstime
Kiralık Depo, Istanbul
2025
“dreamstime is a distinguished leader in stock photography and a major supplier of high quality digital images at unbelievable prices. All stock images available are provided by dreamstime community's photographers, shot on film or digital and approved by our editors.”
Drawing from this royalty-free, commercial framework of circulation and immediate use, Emre Özakat manipulates and reproduces generic stock photographs in oil paint, constructing a continuous frieze from small-scale linen canvases. The extended horizontal format emphasizes accumulation and the forced adjacency of objects from vastly different temporal and cultural registers. Sleek machine parts and turbine blades, rusty gears, a mechanic’s hands mid-repair, discarded children’s toys lodged in branches, ancient toy figures, a primate, and an ancient mummified body, coexist on canvas.
Images once intended for commercial aspiration are corroded and worn, hovering between intelligibility and dissolution. As layers of paint accumulate and imagery bleeds into one another, digital manipulation introduces compression and distortion, while oil and linen lend the images the texture of organic decay. Gathered into a dense, subdued continuum, dreamstime reflects on an image economy defined by excess, circulation, and disposability.
Drawing from this royalty-free, commercial framework of circulation and immediate use, Emre Özakat manipulates and reproduces generic stock photographs in oil paint, constructing a continuous frieze from small-scale linen canvases. The extended horizontal format emphasizes accumulation and the forced adjacency of objects from vastly different temporal and cultural registers. Sleek machine parts and turbine blades, rusty gears, a mechanic’s hands mid-repair, discarded children’s toys lodged in branches, ancient toy figures, a primate, and an ancient mummified body, coexist on canvas.
Images once intended for commercial aspiration are corroded and worn, hovering between intelligibility and dissolution. As layers of paint accumulate and imagery bleeds into one another, digital manipulation introduces compression and distortion, while oil and linen lend the images the texture of organic decay. Gathered into a dense, subdued continuum, dreamstime reflects on an image economy defined by excess, circulation, and disposability.