Exhibition:Digital Engrams
2023-11-30 09:00 - 17:00 (America/Detroit) | 202 S. Thayer - Institute for the Humanities Gallery, #1010
The notion that our brains actually create memories first stored and then revisited has been contemplated since the time of Plato and Aristotle. These units of memory, or engrams, are poetic portals through which we time travel, gaining hindsight and foresight, more meaning and greater wisdom, and hopes for a future less encumbered. Beyond reminiscences of technicolor sunsets, perhaps memories are simply the brain's records of endless repetitions and familiar neural pathways.

In an era of iPhones, Macbooks, Instagram, and Facebook, everything that’s happened to us in recent memory is at our immediate disposal and made to look better than the original … every day of every year, every meal of every trip, every postcard destination. With constant 24/7 access to the newsreel of our own lives, are we losing our innate ability to remember what matters in the process?

In Digital Engrams, L.A. artist Gabriela Ruiz combines sound, video, light and sculpture to create unexpected environments that challenge our sensibilities. The installation considers how images function on and off the screen, and how memories real and curated are the crux of personal and cultural identity. Who do we think we are in this life or the eternal life on the internet hereafter?

Ruiz’s spatial inquiries grapple with the potential erasure of the rituals of memorialization and the richness of material culture so important in her own Latinx heritage and to her sense of self.

–Amanda Krugliak, IH Arts Curator

About the artist:
Gabriela Ruiz is a self-taught artist whose practice blends diverse forms of expression and media, including sculpture, video, painting, and apparel design. Her sculptures incorporate found objects and industrial materials, such as thrift store furniture and insulation foam. Strongly influenced by growing up in L.A.’s San Fernando Valley to immigrant parents from Mexico, Ruiz’s practice is a reflection of the DIY work ethic she was raised under, the vibrancy of Mexican cultural and artistic traditions, and her exposure to subculture and fantasy at a young age as a means to escape the realities of daily life.

One of L.A.’s rising young talents, she presented her solo show Stream at the Palm Springs Art Museum in 2022, part of the museum's Outburst project.

*Gabriela Ruiz is the Jean Yokes Woodhead Visiting Artist at the Institute for the Humanities. This exhibition is part of LSA's fall 2023 Art & Resistance theme semester.*

Exhibition:Holding Places Exhibition by Satchel Lee
2023-11-30 09:00 - 17:00 | North Campus Research Complex Building 18 - Connections Gallery
Gallery Hours: Mon-Fri, 9 am-5 pm or by appointment: serrag@med.umich.edu
Born and raised in New York City, Satchel Lee is a multi-media artist whose work can best be described as portraiture. Through collaborations with her immediate community, and also using herself as a subject, Lee draws inspiration from the quotidian, creating offbeat images that aim to preserve this moment in time, (re) examine memories (especially those clouded by confusion) all the while asking questions around identity and existence.

Lee holds a BFA from the Maurice Kanbar Institute of Film and Television at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. She is currently pursuing her MFA in Photography at School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

In Lee’s photographic exploration, she investigates the profound connection between places and structures and the echoes of trauma that inhabit them. “Holding Places” is an exhibition that immerses viewers into a visual narrative, inviting them to witness the power of space as holders and conduits for personal memory.

By reconstructing these places by hand in model scale and rendering them not as they were, but how she experienced them, she is able to navigate intimate details and hidden narratives that exist within them. The process of crafting these miniatures becomes a meditative contemplation, giving Lee time to sit and reflect on these past events.

Through Lee’s lens, they capture the visual manifestations of the ghosts of the past. The photographs offer glimpses into spaces where anguish, conflict and distress have left their imprints, sometimes visible, sometimes buried beneath layers of time (and self preservation).

Exhibition:Illustrating the Renaissance Book: From Illumination to Woodcut
2023-11-30 09:00 - 20:00 | Hatcher Graduate Library - Hatcher Gallery Exhibit Room, 1st Floor
Enjoy a selection of manuscripts and early printed books from the 15th to the 17th centuries that were illustrated with illuminations and woodcuts. Throughout the European Renaissance (1300-1700), many book illustrations were exclusively ornamental, while others focused on enhancing the meaning of the text. However, as the pages on display attest, all these illustrations share a common ground: they reveal the aesthetic and intellectual fashions first proposed by Italian artists of the 1400s, who were strongly committed to the recovery of the past of classical antiquity.

The word “Illumination,” from the Latin illuminare, “to enlighten or to illuminate,” refers to the embellishment of a manuscript or early printed book with luminous colors, notably gold and silver. This illumination was prominent in the frontispiece, or first page of text, which included the decoration of its borders and initial letter, and even miniatures, that is, scenes with an independent narrative. With the introduction of movable-type printing in 1454, these illuminations would be gradually replaced by woodcuts, which were printed from a woodblock that had been cut by knife along the grain of the wood.

Available during Hatcher Gallery Exhibit Room hours (https://myumi.ch/2m7d4).

Join us on September 13 for a talk by Pablo Alvarez, curator of the exhibit.
