• Chance Nara Park. 2013, custom-designed P.E.T. boxes, light, 84 x 84 x 26 in.. Photo: Courtesy of the Artist
  • Black Mirror Adam Murray. 2013, motor oil, steel, tree trunk, auto body filler, plaster, resin, 96 x 96 x 48 in.. Photo: Courtesy of the Artist
  • Tie-Die Shay Arick. 2012, black shirts, bleach, 12 x 12 x 46 in.. Photo: Courtesy of the Artist

    • When

    Saturday, August 2, 2014 to Saturday, October 4, 2014

    Artists

    Opening Reception

    Part of Whitney White Linen Night 2014 at the CAC.

    Saturday, August 2, 2014 -
    6:00pm to 11:00pm

    Supported by

    Visual Arts Support
    The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; Dathel & Tommy Coleman; Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation; Independent Curators International; Sydney & Walda Besthoff Foundation

    The Contemporary Arts Center is pleased to present the work of 12 award-winning emerging artists who received the esteemed Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award in 2013.

    The International Sculpture Center (ISC) established the Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award program in 1994 to recognize deserving sculpture students and to encourage their continued commitment to the field of sculpture. This year’s winners were selected from a pool of over 414 student nominees from 159 universities in eight countries across the globe. 

    The Student Awards program is organized by the ISC and is sponsored in part by Gertrud and Heinz Aeschlimann, Doris and Donald Fisher, Grounds For Sculpture, the Johnson Art and Education Foundation, the Jon and Mary Shirley Foundation, and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

    A panel of jurors made up of Drew Goerlitz, Sculptor and Associate Professor of Sculpture at SUNY Plattsburgh, Elizabeth Neilson, Director, Zabludowicz Collection, London, and Rein Triefeldt, Sculptor, NJ selected 12 recipients and 5 honorable mentions.

    Shay Arick

    Tie-Die; San Francisco Art Institute in San Francisco, CA

    Artist Statement: When I was a child, after watching a TV program that demonstrated the effect of bleach on photographic paper, I took a photograph of my mother, poured bleach on it, and watched her face slowly fade away. For the first time, I understood the fragility of life. My current work translates personal experiences into physical objects through similar experimentation and play. For each sculpture, I explore different materials and techniques, seeking, much like an alchemist, an enigmatic mixture of concept and form, creation and destruction.

    Kevin Bauer

    Illuminated Cavities; ArtEZ Enschede, Netherlands

    Artist Statement: My work investigates the interaction between sculpture and space through perspective, shadow, and structure. I am inspired by forgotten contradictions and the things that elude us in daily life. Using wood, metal, plaster, concrete, acrylic glass, and cardboard, I search for the familiar in objects. Though I try to maintain human traces, I also want to create a peculiar presence that balances the recognizable and the unknown, the material and the immaterial.

    Nicholas Carroll

    You can balance a painting with a cheesebuger; Minneapolis College of Art and Design in Minneapolis, MN

    Artist Statement: My compositions attempt to work through my struggles with personal relationships. Combining two-dimensional and three-dimensional elements, as well as found objects, many of these sculptures reject permanent fastenings and rely instead on balance and counterbalance as they are assembled, deconstructed, and reassembled over time. When selecting my components, I search for a “déjà vu” experience that connects past and present emotion in a universal and deeply personal synthesis.

    Brian Booth Craig

    Suicide Machine; New York Academy of Art in New York, NY

    Artist Statement: Examining incarnate experience, my work attempts to establish identity. I am interested in the artistic manifestation of self-scrutiny. Subjective analysis of a body unveils a tension between perception and reality, which I strive to depict. For me, the manipulation of raw material becomes an act of self-portraiture and a formation of identity. What emerges is a myth of the self and a material biography of form.

    Shaun de Rooy

    The Wise Man Built His ...; University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada

    Artist Statement: Construction materials and methods are fundamental to my exploration of manufactured spaces. Does the generic quality of the built environment create equally bland people? In Zambia, I watched craftsmen pound bricks using basic tools and local termite soil. I couldn’t help but wonder what Western bricks (and buildings) would look like if we used only what we could find in our immediate surroundings. Would we find adequate material? And if not, what would that say about the state of our environment?

    Daniel Feinberg

    Deployment: The Plight of Ought Performance #1; University of Iowa in University Heights, IA

    Artist Statement: Gottfried Leibniz famously argued that the actual world—the world we inhabit—is the best of all possible worlds. Other worlds, however, can be a valuable tool in understanding our reality. Combining sculpture, performance, and film (disdaining “movie magic”), I present viewers with alternative worlds that are maybe not so different from our own. The conclusion that the possible is the actual will, I hope, move viewers past dismissal of my world and toward engagement with it.

    Cody Henrichs

    Girl From the North Country Fair; Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, RI

    Artist Statement: Precarious, and often cryptic, my objects, films, and paintings act as vehicles for narrative investigations into masculinity, abandonment, nature, co-dependency, sexual desire, power, speed, love, and loss. My sculpture is both a physical and conceptual structure through which I can attempt to address uncontrollable forces, a space to address the chaos, where I can see the subtle poetry of my life with more clarity.

    Aaron Meyers

    Smile; University of Texas at Austin in Austin, TX

    Artist Statement: Equal parts finished sculpture and recorded action, my work aims to understand the universe materially. Physically, the objects explore transition, force, and balance. Poetically, they create metaphoric equilibrium and transcend pure matter. I find beauty in ingenuity, surprise, and precision and I use physical means to search for deep connections. Paradoxically, I try to create timeless forms tied to contingency, revealing the process of their fabrication and decay.

    Adam Murray

    Black Mirror; Rutgers University Mason Gross School of the Arts in New Brunswick, NJ

    Artist Statement: This current body of work re-imagines the relationship between found material and crafted object. By addressing fundamental concerns specific to sculpture, these works explore and challenge definitions of space, material, and context.

    Nara Park

    Chance; Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, MD

    Artist Statement: My work engages in a search for the lost meaning of authenticity. I use objects that imitate a natural original, such as marble-printed wallpaper, wood-grained vinyl siding, and custom-designed disposable containers printed with stone patterns. I stack hundreds of these boxes to form reflections on mortality. Though the trompe l’oeil stone effect alludes to sacred places, my sculptures are hollow. The discrepancy provokes an emotional response, intimating the transience of the physical world.

    Nick Roudebush

    The Fence Line; University of Notre Dame in South Bend, IN

    Artist Statement: Though the image of the heroic American agrarian has been obscured by an industrial model, the “human interface”—and the implied connection to the land—remains an icon, along with pastoral vistas, vernacular architecture, and the family farm. The Fence Line offers a reminder of a basic, necessary human condition. Absence and presence, material and process, history and site, boundary and transition, and interaction and perspective expand the vocabulary of agrarian art, turning an elegy for the heroic agrarian into an allegory for our times.

    Angie Seykora

    Part I; Edinboro University in Edinboro, PA

    Artist Statement: Though I work with the ubiquitous and disposable (wrapping paper, confetti, party streamers, tinsel, cellophane filler, and tape), my sculptures are process-based. I employ labor-intensive craft techniques to create forms and surface patterns that might appear to be made by machine, but closer investigation reveals slight imperfections and marks made by the hand. By challenging viewers to question the hierarchy of materials, I invite them into a realm of sensual, formal delight.

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