Associate Professor, Department of Visual Arts and Art History, York University
Associate Professor, Department of Visual Arts and Art History, York University
At this stage of my career as a scholar and curator, the fellowship allowed me to take a more global approach, by exploring the Japanese context of assemblage sculpture. Japan assemblage has a complex and complicated history that is understudied, particularly by art historians and critics writing in English.
Dr. Adler was an Ishibashi Foundation/The Japan Foundation Fellow for Research on Japanese Art. He was one of the first Canadians to receive this honour. Based mostly in Tokyo, Dr. Adler travelled extensively around Japan for the duration of his fellowship.
I researched the series of assemblage sculptures, known as the Compact Objects, produced in the 1960s by NAKANISHI Natsuyuki (1935-2016), one of the founding members of the avant-garde group High Red Center. One of the most important accomplishments of my trip was the viewing, and discussion, of virtually all of the Compact Objects housed in Japanese museum collections.
At this stage of my career as a scholar and curator, the fellowship allowed me to take a more global approach, by exploring the Japanese context of assemblage sculpture. Japan assemblage has a complex and complicated history that is understudied, particularly by art historians and critics writing in English. Given my background in European and North American modernism and contemporary art, I felt well-suited to the task of conducting comparative research of this kind.
Dr. Adler is producing publications and organizing museum exhibitions from the research he conducted during his fellowship.
Some of my best memories [in Japan] include meetings with curators at museums that house NAKANISHI’s works. Not only will these contacts be useful in the future (when planning publications and potential curatorial projects), but that experience was personally very satisfying for me.
I have begun the process of synthesizing research done during the fellowship, and the writing of a book manuscript about NAKANISHI’s Compact Objects. In addition, I had some preliminary conversations with a few museums about the prospect of organizing an exhibition featuring the Compact Objects.
