DeHaan Artist of Distinction Award Exhibition

For the past year Calderwood has been working with community members that have immigrated to Delaware County, Indiana, she has asked for each participant to loan her a meaningful textile from their country so that she can reinterpret the patterns in copper, enamel, and glass seed beads. The beads fired on the enamel replicate the stitch originally created in fiber. The glass and metal become a permanent mark to capture a material, a moment, and a story. Each participant has a photograph taken of their original textile in the context of their current home.

The climate crisis, the real apocalypse, is here. Around 2800 years ago, the inhabitants of the Cappadocia area, Türkiye, made a crucial decision due to the harsh conditions they faced, including severe weather and the constant fear of conflict. They opted to construct a complete Derinkuyu underground city, which remains the oldest and the biggest underground city, accommodating approximately 20,000 residents and offering schools, residences, markets, and places of worship. Mıhçi reimagined this city to show how we can scientifically imagine it during the climate crisis and how humans would live in underground cities using scientific facts and science fiction in the future.

Hand In Hand is a multi-layered work exploring Narin’s ancestors and how our stories are connected. This project is a personal investigation of transformation through migration. It delves into how Narin’s ancestors’ immigration has created a cycle of repetition in the family story through family archives, found images, and cyanotype prints. As an immigrant who migrated from Turkey to the United States in 2018, Narin naturally started to pay more attention to her ancestors’ stories, which were not widely acknowledged in her family. Her great-grandparents migrated to Turkey from Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Although Narin has some information about these experiences, the stories still have gaps. She creates a personal history record by imagining past stories and filling in the blanks through her spiritual perspective. Combining family portraits with cyanotype prints produced from slides showing microscopic views of human cells, Narin proposes that we embody the experience of our ancestors. The found street photos show the city of Sarajevo, where her ancestors are from. Erasing the people on the streets with rough gestures and turning the images into black and white, she depicts the feeling of the aftermath of a city where a lot of their locals left and immigrated.

Welcome To Your Mind is an interactive installation honoring the power of human form and its self healing through art and nature. As an immigrant from Brazil, I’m combining the essence of the Amazon rainforest with American nature, with exploration of a new body of work introducing several new techniques. The installation ‘Welcome to Your Mind’ is composed of two parts. The first part is to present the tools that are being suggested changing the mindset, self healing. A workbench with objects representing the four elements of nature: earth, water, air and fire, are displayed along with artworks and personal objects, as an altar. The artworks are oil paintings of my ancestors from the Amazon rainforest and amulets in the form of necklaces. The second part is the ‘taking action’. Space, the fifth element of nature, is a dress sculpture knitted with hand spun rose American fiber and dyed with Brazilian coffee. Words of affirmation, healing words, are typed on paper made with recycled fibers that are embedded with wildflower seeds. Viewers are invited to participate in the installation by collecting the papers attached on the dress to take some of the healing words home with them. They can plant the paper with wildflower seeds and vibrant words, creating a bond with the Amazon rainforest and American soil with renewed vibrant energy.

Visual Vernacular (VV) is a unique and powerful performance art form that combines elements of sign language, mime, and theatrical techniques. It is characterized by strong body language, facial expressions, and iconic gestures, creating a visually rich and expressive storytelling medium.

In this video, 20 performers come together to create a stunning display of Visual Vernacular, focusing on the theme of the five elements. Through their collective artistry, they bring these elements to life, weaving a tapestry of movement and expression that captivates and inspires. This collaborative performance not only showcases the beauty and versatility of Visual Vernacular but also highlights the profound connection between the performers and the natural world.