Judge’s Comments:
This is a great example of economic use of color and brush stroke to express the barrage of rapids, bending tree limbs and agitated sky. While the composition hangs nervously on the salmon and cadmium horizon line that splits the length in half, the artist stacks the right side with a lush and darkening grove of green and black and the frenetic crash of white waves. It is a landscape that is a metaphor for an adventure without resolution, but instead, an important lesson on having a healthy respect for the journey.

Judges Comments:

These dolphins are both inspired by and emerge from the marbleized paint across the surface of the work. Their difference in scale, their proximity, and their implied eye contact depict an oceanic mother and child portrait. However, their simultaneously reflective and transparent skin maintain a surrealistic push and pull relationship between their positive contours and the negative swirls. Finally, I am attracted to the way their combined form exists in the rectangle like an undulating central heart with appendages that reach toward three of the four sides of our underwater viewfinder. They are buoyant and ebullient.

 

Judges Comments:

This collection of inked cartoons fashioned after a family’s photo album brings the depicted figures alive in a similar way that a great storyteller flourishes with tangential musings and relatable truths. The presence of the artist’s hand minimizes the passage of time and connects the family members, instead, with a familiar gesture, facial expression or emphasized characteristic.

Artist comments: I have recently been working extensively with the subject of my great-grandmother’s diaries, written in French from 1919 – 1951. These diaries are intimate accounts spanning 32 years of a young Jewish woman’s life in New York City at the turn of the century. For this piece I recreated pages from her diary using a matte-medium photographic process, so that the final product is semi-translucent and skin-like. I then sewed together envelopes using the pages of an old french grammar guide from the 1940s to hold these pages.

Judges Comments:

This memorial to the artist’s great-grandmother connects two individuals separated by a century and a language barrier by matching the intentional work of both sets of careful hands. This conceptual portrait invites the viewer to quietly explore the impact of ancestral research, memory, language, and the first person narratives on our own identities and our life’s works.