Dirimart is thrilled to host Canan Tolon’s first solo exhibition Tunnel Vision with the gallery in its new location at Pera, Istanbul. Her exhibition is the outcome of a two-year long labor, during which Covid 19 caused interruption and the persisting social malaise that remained afterward. Composed of multiple paintings, Tunnel Vision is an installation that unfolds multiple vistas frozen in its spread, such as broken filmstrips in its real, while life maintains its course.
Tunnel Vision has two definitions; one being a medical condition that significantly reduces peripheral vision. The second one, which informed this series of paintings, defines a tendency to focus exclusively on a single or limited goal or point of view. As its title suggests, the artist uses both optical as well as behavioral definitions to reveal a collective malaise that results from the consequence of a post-Covid world.
Canan Tolon’s work is often informed by a preoccupying idea or concern, and it is materialized in a given space, where conditions such as volume, light, etc. would shape it further. It was with these concerns in mind that Tunnel Vision was created. In this series, multiple diptychs are composed around a single point perspective around which vistas are seemingly converging and collapsing. These paintings are lined up on the ground the same way the artist painted them around herself, trapping herself in. Sharing this queasy experience, the absence of horizons is disorienting, as there is no right, nor wrong way to view them.
