Residency Projects Part 4

Kala Fellowships are awarded annually to eight innovative artists working in printmaking, photography, book arts, installation, video and digital media. Fellowship artists are selected from a competitive field of applicants from the United States, South America, Europe, Africa, Australia and Asia. Recipient artists receive a financial award and up to six-months residency at Kala’s studio facility followed by an exhibition of their new work. The Kala Gallery is proud to present the last in our four-part exhibition series, Residency Projects, featuring work by our 2007-2008 Fellowship artists.

Adriane Colburn is well known for her cartographic installations comprised of layers of hand cut paper, light and shadow that explore underlying systems within our environment. During her residency at Kala, Adriane had the rare opportunity to join an arctic expedition on a United States Coast Guard icebreaker. During her time on the ship she worked closely with a team of scientists engaged in creating the first accurate maps of the floor of Arctic Ocean. Adriane’s new work is based on these maps and data that was collected onboard the ship. Her work has been widely exhibited including “Bay Area Now/4” at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, New Langton Arts and the Luggage Store. She is a recent recipient of the Eureka Fellowship and the Artadia Award in 2006. Adriane received her MFA from Stanford where she is currently a visiting lecturer.

Iranian-born artist Taraneh Hemami will present “Theory of Survival”, a project inspired by protest literature produced by an Bay Area Iranian student group. The students mobilized against the Shah’s regime and the Islamic Republic by producing books, posters, newspapers and essays that reflect both Iranian and local history from 1964–1984. Taraneh will be creating a digital print installation based on materials accessed from the student protest archives. Her work has been widely exhibited including recent exhibitions in the Bay Area at The Lab and Intersection for the Arts. She has received awards from the Creative Work Fund, the James Irvine Foundation and the California Council for the Humanities. She is currently a lecturer at California College of the Arts.

Leslie Shows will present a new series of mixed media collage prints created from a combination of processes including etching, monotype, digital printing and painting. Her works take the materiality of the body and earthly elements as a starting point for her ambiguous landscape-based imagery.  Dust bunnies are depicted as personal “geological erosion”; underground mines are encrusted with salt; and thunderheads of blood and other bodily humours form a mysterious new landscape. These are environs that reference violent storms that are both inner and outer world experiences. Leslie’s works have been widely seen including the current “Bay Area Now/5” at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and a one-person exhibition at Jack Hanley Gallery in New York in April. She received SFMOMA’s SECA award in 2006.

There will be an Artists’ Talk in the gallery with Adriane Colburn and Leslie Shows on Tuesday, October 21 at 7:00pm. The talk is free and open to the public.