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Profile
"She carried ninety sons, and will attend ninety
more..."
by Gul CAGIN
Alfanta aka Gulcagin, born as a cruel woman, a cruel,
cruel woman with a tremendous head in which there is
a ceaseless, burrowing pain.
The pain in her head is the cause of her cruelties.
At night she creeps to her lover's side, places herself
next to him while he sleeps, and whispers coarse things.
She can fly. She has flown.
She has been seen; my neighbor saw her and pointed
at her in the sky--I saw him below my bedroom window
in his slippers, shaking his head and saying, "There
she is! There she goes."
She
is a sorceress and a very cheap hag. She mixes scraps of paper together with
toiletries to make soup. She is angry at the stars,
which prick her skull. I have seen her raving at them and at
the moon. And yet she is big; she is voluptuous. She
carried ninety sons, and will attend ninety more, and
ninety
after that. There is no end to her. She will continue
evenafter them. She swallows the black heavens, or would,
if she wanted to. She has everything in her tote bag:
steaks, ranchero hats, bug spray, lydocaine, hearts
of palm, autobiographies of superstars, miniature golf
discount coupons, hairnets, infants, boars, ninety-nine
and nine-tenths solutions, fonts, holy asses, stick
pins, plus more.
Cats like her.
She married a shoe-shiner who insists on rolling
his eyes at every remark. Her days are long and clouded by a vague
dissatisfaction. It's not enough. The pain in her head
is not enough, so she makes plans and reasons with her
hands in her lap alone at the prow of her long, dark
barge, frightening the waters.
Transferring
from a community college, Pasadena City College, Gul
Cagin studied art in University of Southern California
(B.F.A. 1999) and Claremont Graduate University (M.F.A
2001). During her attendance at USC, Gul studied drawing,
painting, photography, sculpture film and worked as
an intern for artist Robert Flick. At Claremont Graduate
University, she started to incorporate video projections
and performance activities into her installations questioning
personal and social spaces of the self. She received
Pasadena Art Alliance, Angie Battaglia, William C. Miller
and USC Friends of Art Scholarship and listed in Deanís
List many times. She also received merit fellowship
from Claremont Graduate University and worked as a teaching
assistant for a graduate discussion group.Interested
in showing emerging artists' works, Gul Co-curated a
group show,In-formation, with Arzu Arda Kosar at Claremont
Graduate University and looking into creating collaborative
projects with Turkish artists as well. She currently
lives and shows her work in Los Angeles, California.
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