Intervening Variables

It is especially at highly fraught, impactful moments which challenge our core values that human autonomy is threatened with reduction to simply that of an intervening variable, frail, sensitive and short-lived, which often makes the mental states manifested during such times intense and long lived. "Intervening Variables" is a series that uses these "mental environments" as a vehicle to examine individuals' role as intervening variables and their transitory, temporary or permanent reactions to this environment. Here the subjects’ mental environment is visualized as a tangible place, and then the individuals, which represent human core values, are placed in the picture to express their interactions within it. In this project, people are observed in macro perspective, often not distinguished from each other, and as a result, represented by the same silhouette in most cases. The series comes from the creator's everyday observations and understandings of human nature, and it also serves as a homage to those subject individuals whose actions might have somewhat resembled that of a Greek hero. The artwork itself is an imprint or a record of such observation and explanation of human nature; however any attempt to explain human nature are inevitably incomplete, as the concept of "human nature" itself is in a sense, egoistic, which makes the attempt to explain it paradoxically fall into the trap of our own ego.