Award of Excellence
I am the recipient of a RISD 2008 Graduate Award of Excellence. The Fine Arts category was juried by Ian Berry, Associate Director and Curator of The Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College.
Juror’s Statement
We are living in unsteady times. One of the things we look to artists to do is to be on that first line of cultural criticism, reflecting our world back to us, helping us to see. This year’s group of RISD graduates reacts to our world’s uneasiness, volatility, and unclear future by looking carefully at their most intimate surroundings - cracks, breaking points, shadows, crumpled paper, nooks, cubicles, wires - and responds with actions such as bike riding, hand shaking, walking, braiding, drawing. These are ways of working that support a quiet, not wholly melancholy, but concentrated view into everyday life. The subtle turns in their artworks-from one thing to another, from one emotion to another-makes for complex work that rewards repeated viewing. For me, that is the test of a successful artwork. All the award winners have some element of that “turn” in their presentations, a shift that makes what I thought I was looking into something else, moving me too.
Jeanne Jo’s “My First Punch” is a harrowing video to watch. Jo then takes that intensity and enlarges her ideas through performative tasks that witness her writing a plea in the darkness, escaping down a hand-wound rope, and training her yarn to stitch together unusual places and objects. Moving her site from the most personal (her own face and hands) to the most public (city street, public park, or row house) Jo tests her ideas on wildly different-scaled stages.
See my submission here.
Some of my brilliant friends also won awards:
Nathaniel Katz
Lucas Roy
Caleb Larsen
Elizabeth Skadden
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