Selection Panel 2014

 

Gary Hill – an American artist lives and works in Seattle, Washington, often viewed as one of the foundational artists in video art, passionate about women and their beauty. Art historian Lynne Cooke summarizes:

“A pioneer in his embrace of the then novel medium of video, Hill distinguished himself through a radical approach that both literally and conceptually deconstructed it. Single channel works were soon followed by installations in which video screens were unhoused, suspended, multiplied, miniaturized, or otherwise manipulated.

On other occasions, video tubes mysteriously projected unframed images in dark fields or from oscillating beacons panning an empty room, text and figure swivelled in anamorphic distortion. No artist of Hill’s generation probed this medium with such invasive scrutiny, and none deployed it with such protean irreverence. And when his restless curiosity led him to computer based technologies and virtual space in the early Nineties, few of his peers proved so avid or dedicated in exploiting this uncharted terrain for art making.

Since he rarely deployed technology as a tool in service to an exploration of the visual world, questions of representation have played a relatively minor role in his work: typically, he treats mediums as sites and enablers of languages both verbal and visual. Surveying with hindsight what now amounts to more than three decades of his activity, it’s striking how far his path has veered from his peers’ and not least because it betrays so few allegiances to histories of representation.

Sarah  Maple – the best of the new young British artists’ lives in her native Sussex, feminist and activist

Beverley Knowles summarizes:
“Sarah Maple’s artwork is unfailingly bold and brave, not for the coy or faint of heart. These unflinching, occasionally even controversial, investigations into what it is to be a woman and a Muslim in 21st century Britain are made joyful by her own very personal brand of boisterous, tongue-in-cheek humour.

This is not sensationalism for sensationalism’s sake, but rather a heart felt urge by a twenty-seven-year old artist of great sincerity and talent, for the viewer to look again, and this time with a more questioning eye, at traditionally accepted notions of identity, gender, culture and religion.”

 

Lee Weinberg  - is an independent curator and academic working between London, UK and Haifa, Israel. She recently submitted her PHD thesis (Goldsmiths, University of London) on the topic of Curating the Immaterial and the role of the curator in contemporary culture.