Canan Tolon has been awarded the 2012 Kidder Residency in the Arts and will start out our exhibition schedule with a bang. Tolon was born in Istanbul, but resides in Emeryville, California, with a career spanning both. She currently opened the exhibition Then, and Then at Gallery Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, where she maintains a permanent studio, and will also be featured in the Istanbul Biennial.

With a background in painting as well as architecture, Tolon’s work builds complex frameworks through her paintings and installations that seem to allude to man- made structures, film frames, and futuristic worlds, undulating from possibility to endless repetition.  Her exhibition at the Institute for the Humanities will present new work inspired by her residency with us in Michigan.

Learn more at www.canantolon.com. 

God, sex and animals talking are the three chief reasons books are banned and are the subject of Nigel Poor’s exhibition. Poor examines and deconstructs the notion of censored books through photographic, sculptural and text-based works. This project commenced in 2008 when Poor was invited to participate in an exhibition focusing on this subject and chose to focus her investigation on books that included women’s names in the titles or overtly referenced women; the list consisted of 45 books including Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Girl Interrupted, Julie of the Wolves and The Diary of Anne Frank. Poor subverts the conception of these books as “dirty” or “unclean” by washing and drying each of the selected books, empowering those tasks typically associated with women’s housework in a new appraisal of these works. She explains, “laundering took the book from being a concrete object with the ability to communicate a story, characters, concepts, etc. to a maimed fragment of itself,” facilitating the reconceptualization of these books under different parameters.

Poor began making photographic images of what remained of these books after their laundering. The resulting photographs present captivating sculptural objects that offer fragmentary glimpses of sentences, character names and illustrations. While she can control the way the remnants are approached photographically, chance dictates the way these books respond to washing and drying. Books of high literary repute are printed on better paper, allowing the pages to resist the severity of Poor’s treatment; lesser works of literature printed on newsprint are virtually washed away. This material is pushed even further through a series of waxed book sculptures that evoke the form and delicacy of bird’s nests. Through these sculptural works, Poor utilizes the book materials to their fullest extent, honoring them in this somewhat elegiac manner.

Poor’s work is held in the permanent collections of a number of institutions including the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; and Duke University Art Museum, Durham, NC. She has been included in exhibitions at the Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego; San Jose Museum of Art; and San Francisco Arts Commission. Since 2003, she has served as an Associate Professor of Photography at California State University.

To commence the year 2013, the gallery will house belongings from Jason De León’s Undocumented Migration Project, which has become the largest assemblage of migrant artifacts in the country. The exhibition will represent the collaboration of De León, curator Amanda Krugliak, and artist Richard Barnes, a past Institute for the Humanities Sidman Fellow in the Arts.

Jason De León is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan. He directs the Undocumented Migration Project (UMP), a long-term ethnographic and archaeological study focused on clandestine migration between Mexico and the United States. This research focuses on the political economy of human smuggling, the material culture of border crossing, and the lived experiences of migrants.

Detroit-based Artist Lynne Avadenka, inspired by the idea of the book, combines words and images, working in a variety of media.

She writes:

"These are the constants that guide and inspire me, confound and challenge me, and compel me to make art:

The philosophical and physical presence of the book, as repository of memory and loss, as a vehicle for transmitting transcendent information, as a singular object binding together a multiplicity of ideas.

The visual power of word and image combined, the notion that both word and image are formed from abstractions, and both are codes to be deciphered.

An engagement with Judaic subject matter: ritual, ceremony and classic texts, and the resulting synthesis of tradition and modernity.

The mark making of printmaking and calligraphy—repeatable (printed) and unique (hand-drawn).

Exploring the beauty and power of line, and the graphic essence of a letter–whether it can be “read” or not.

Investigating the very nature of visual language."