The Artist Space Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of the third Abstract Art Exhibition. Along with the selected artists, the jury selected award winners in the following art categories: painting, photography, and sculpture. The show displayed a variety of artistic styles and mediums: oil on canvas, acrylic, watercolor, photography, digital art. Out of all submissions received 90 artworks were selected to be included in the exhibition.
Best of Show
Robert Obier
Short Biography and Statement
Design is the art of storytelling. Through stories we give meaning and context to this journey we all share. My cause is to create an art that inspires meaning and speaks of some untold story -some distant time - some mysterious place - some unknown tomorrow. This is what I call, “the stuff of dreams”. The final sculpted artwork is derived from an initial “thumbnail” sketch. The preliminary shapes are explored and refined through multiple iterations as 3-d computer models. These varied iterations may serve to refine an idea or may be individually produced as a limited series of sculptural works. The work combines the "tried and true" techniques of old-fashioned craftsmanship with today's most advanced rapid prototyping technologies such as CAD modeling, 3-D printing, and CNC fabrication. Particular finish applications such as weathering and rust recall an ‘earlier time’ in the story of certain pieces - the scars of a past life. Nevertheless, the work has a timeless quality - seeming to exist in the past, the present and the future - simultaneously.
Painting Prize
Mick Ulichney
Short Biography and Statement
I am a retired professor from SCAD (The Savannah College of Art and Design) where I taught advertising for 14 years after a 25-year career as a Creative Director at a variety of ad agencies. My MFA is in Painting, and I have continued to paint over the years. I have an exhibition record that includes one man shows and acceptance into various prestigious juried shows such as at the Cleveland Museum of annual Art’s May Show and the Butler Museum of Art’s annual National Midyear Competition. The Butler purchased one of my paintings for their collection. I have received many awards for my work and my paintings are in corporate and private collections across the country. My style has evolved over the years from Neo Pop to my current Hard Edge contemporary work. I’m on a creative journey and I am always surprised by where it’s taking me. I’m an artist with an artist’s drive to create – a dreamer with a dreamer’s desire to discover what could be – and a romantic with a romantic’s insatiable passion for squeezing everything I can out of this gift of life.
Sculpture Prize
Jason Shih
Short Biography and Statement
Jason Shih was born in 1972 in Taiwan. In 1991, he began to specialize in metal sculpture when he was a sophomore in the Fine Arts Dept. of Taipei National University of the Arts. In 2001, he graduated from School for American Crafts, Rochester Institute of Technology, USA, and majored in Metal Sculpture. And then, he served as the metal sculptor Albert Paley's assistant, involved in crafts and public art work practices. Furthermore, he earned his Art Ph. D. from China Academy of Art, China (2015). Now, he lives in Taiwan, and consistently engages in the both areas of sculpture and public art. Jason Shih’s artistic vision is shaped by a diverse array of influences, from contemporary dance to avant-garde fashion. He cites German choreographer Pina Bausch and British designer Alexander McQueen as significant inspirations. Bausch’s explorations of time and space resonate with Shih’s interest in sculpture’s capacity to embody kinetic energy and spatial imagination. McQueen’s innovative approach to contemporary imagery and themes provides Shih with a broad canvas for creative expression. Shih’s work is also influenced by the aesthetic principles of Futurism and Constructivism, movements that emphasize dynamic energy and continuous motion. These influences are evident in his pursuit of capturing the beauty of movement and the elegant restraint of natural forces. Shih’s sculptures often depict moments of defying gravity, capturing the fleeting beauty of motion in a static form. As a professional sculptor, Jason likes to experience the taste of life with perceptual observation in the subtle moments, and also likes the ever-changing situation of game shapes in the poetic imaginary space. For Jason, art creation is to share various moods and stories in daily life.
Photography Prize
Michael Prais
Short Biography and Statement
Photographs of scenes with arrangements of deteriorating objects are reassembled to ask viewers to consider how photographs function without their chief characteristic: resemblance. As much as resemblance is heralded as reality, photographs are always disconnected from reality. Reassembly challenges viewers to consider photographs without the resemblance and the composition that are central to the Modernist conception of photography. Reassembly is produces a self-collage that signals, as collages did a century ago, an expected, disturbing reality and by producing an (oxymoronic) non-representational photograph. Reassembling photographs takes constituent blocks out of context while each and every piece of the photograph remains visible and each piece–and the whole–remains a photograph. Reassembly converts a single photograph with a single frame into hundreds of photographs with as many frames emphasizing the frame over content through repetition. The reassembly of photographs figuratively illustrates that photographs are immediately and forever taken out of context. Loss of context of any photograph creates graphical discontinuities at each of its edges that point to precipitous loss after a finite length, time, or life. These rectangles are metaphors for our finite lives. As the original structure is hidden in and by the overall chaotic appearance of the distorted image, this treatment suggests a loss of usefulness and value and perhaps our progression away from a more structured life and toward chaos. Reassembly could be pushed to the level of pixels to create chaos, but small regions of each photographs remain recognizable so that one can recognize the deterioration and loss captured in my first type of photograph. Abandoned and deteriorating objects in these photographs and the reassembled photographs of them are also metaphors for our lives. I believe that I will not have an afterlife. This project helps me, and perhaps viewers, deal with our ultimate concern.
Winners