Curator’s Choice Panel — Artists Talk on Art
On Friday night, after a round of gallery-going in Chelsea, I attended the Curator’s Choice panel of the Artists Talk on Art (ATOA) series at the School of Visual Arts. The panel includes the six winners from this year’s Curator’s Choice juried competition. Although the paintings I submitted weren’t selected, I was interested in learning about the jurying process as well as seeing the kind of work that was chosen.
Juror Jim Kempner from Jim Kempner Fine Art explained his selection process as going through multiple iterations over several weeks, each time narrowing down the field until he found his winners. Over 100 artists entered the competition and only six were chosen, so the competition is definitely a long shot. I was very impressed with not only the quality of the work but also by how articulate each of the artists were in describing their processes and goals; this left me feeling less bad about not being chosen (though only slightly less jealous 
.
Of the winners, I was particularly impressed with the work of recent RISD grad Celeste Rapone, whose figurative works exploring the meaning of being brought up Catholic were well executed and full of meaning. Rapone uses her illustration background to good effect, creating paintings that are graphic, memorable, and poignant (see Creme Filled, which shows a puffy-faced young girl surrounded by more culturally ideal bikini models).
Kate Teal (I couldn’t find a web page for her) presented a series of oil paintings depicting her and her husband sleeping in bed at night, derived loosely from photos that were automatically snapped every 30 minutes throughout one night. By selectively applying color for the figures’ flesh and by rendering the folds in the pillows and sheets, they are a nice balance of abstraction and representation.
Keun Young Park (no link available) exhibited figurative images collaged together from torn up, creatively Photoshopped photographs, including symbols such as birds to represent the human spirit in her compositions.
Iowa-based Thomas C. Jackson presented composited photographs primarily from his “American Slice” series. Each image consists of two or more slices of larger photographs, spliced together (usually vertically), occasionally with some Photoshopped mirroring or flipping, to create images with compositional interest. The artist says that although all of the images have specific meanings, he prefers to allow viewers to bring their own interpretations to the works.
It was hard to see the details of Michele Bova’s abstract oil paintings in the slides (and the only link I could find was here), but it seemed that they fit nicely into the family of brushstroke-filled abstraction presently seen on West 25th Street that I described in my last posting.
Judd Boloker described his colored pencil on bristol board drawings that are based upon photos he’s taken from places like the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. Starting with one or more photos, he abstracts them into graphic images (see this firework-inspired Papyrus Plant) through the heavy application of colored pencil to the support.
It was an informative evening, though I had been under the impression that more of the work submitted to the competition would be screened prior to the panel presentation. I was hoping to see how my own slides showed up on the big screen and where they might have fit in among the rest of the competition. If you would like to see the work of any of the winning artists in person, they will be included in a group show at Jim Kempner Fine Art, though the date of the show has yet to be determined.
Tags: Chelsea
