ICA Foster Prize 2011 Brochure

Stephen Tourlentes Amie Siegel Evelyn Rydz

Daniela Rivera Matthew Rich

Rebecca Meyers Fred Liang Eirik Johnson

Robert de Saint Phalle

September 22, 2010 – January 17, 2011

Showcasing and celebrating the work of artists in our own community is an in-

tegral aspect of the ICA’s exhibition program. The James and Audrey Foster Prize (formerly the ICA Artist Prize) is a biennial exhibition and award that recognizes Boston artists whose work demonstrates exceptional artistic promise through innovation, conceptual strength, and skillful execution.

This year the James and Audrey Foster Prize exhibition features work by nine Boston-area artists: Robert de Saint Phalle, Eirik Johnson, Fred Liang, Rebecca Meyers, Matthew Rich, Daniela Rivera, Evelyn Rydz, Amie Siegel, and Stephen Tourlentes. The ICA looks to a broad network of colleagues to nominate artists for the prize. Last fall some fifty locally based arts professionals identified more than seventy artists, from which the nine finalists were selected. In January 2011 a jury of three internationally recognized curators will convene to select one of these artists as the winner of the 2010 Foster Prize, which comes with an award of $25,000.

The Foster Prize exhibition and award were established to recognize Boston-area artists who demonstrate exceptional artistic promise. In Boston, as elsewhere around the country and around the world today, the question of what it means to identify artists in relationship to the community in which they live and work has grown more complex. Fueled by advances in technology that have ramped up the speed and reach of information and images, and by the escalating mobility of the world’s population, the art world has become increasingly international in character. International art fairs and biennials, along with galleries and museums with branches in multiple cities and countries, further lend a nomadic aspect to today’s art world. Even television has become contemporary art–savvy, with reality shows situating art in virtual locations that are accessible to a vast new audience of home viewers. So, what does it mean to present an exhibition focused on “local” artists in 2010?

The Boston area is home to a varied and vibrant community of artists. The 2010 Foster Prize exhibition presents artwork made by artists with studios in South Boston, Jamaica Plain, Hyde Park, Cambridge, the South End, Framingham, and Somerville. Yet while the Boston

area serves as a home base to all nine of these artists, their concerns as well as their backgrounds are global.

They hail from locales including China, Chile, Miami, and Seattle, and work in diverse media. They pursue interests that are political, historical, aesthetic, psychological, spiritual, and environmental, and employ materials from oil paint on canvas to solid freeform fabrication.

Despite these distinctions, areas of shared concern emerge. For example many artists in the 2010 Foster Prize exhibition address our relationship to the natural environment as an integral element or as a recurrent and powerful point of departure. Eirik Johnson looks at and listens to the fragile, rapidly changing eco-system of a biologically diverse jungle. Evelyn Rydz sees the intertwining of man and nature in the flotsam washed up by the sea, and Rebecca Meyers recognizes the drowsy housecat on the window seat and the stylized drawing of a peacock on wallpaper as reflections of “nature” in contemporary urban life.

Cultural, historical, and socio-political concerns are also frequently explored. Daniela Rivera pushes the physical limits of traditional painting to involve viewers in the historical and geographic migration of people and ideas, Stephen Tourlentes raises political issues as he focuses on the boundary between inside and outside in his photographs of prisons in America, and Fred Liang explores spiritual, intellectual, and historical aspects of the interchange between what we experience as Eastern and Western cultures.

At a moment when scientific knowledge about the workings of the human brain is rapidly increasing, artists are exploring aspects of perception and the human psyche in their own way. This interest makes sense given that observation and interpretation—inherent elements of art viewing, which engages not only the eye but also memory, intellect, and emotion—are caused and affected in part by neurological processes. The history of psychiatric theory and practice plays a role in the sculpture and installations of Robert de Saint Phalle, whose works are integrally and intimately connected with their physical environment, acting as a metaphor for the viewer’s relationship to space and objects. A keen awareness

of the cultural history of looking, whether in Hollywood cinema, East German surveillance film, or home movies, is one aspect of the films made by Amie Siegel, whose most recent work explores our relationship to the physical, emotional, and psychological landscape of home in America. Process as well as perception is in play in the work of Matthew Rich, whose cut-paper paintings make knowing use of conventions of representation to spur our engagement with, and delight in, color and abstraction.

The definition and description of what is considered a work of art is ever-changing, as artists wrestle with individual visions and concerns and respond to their own time and place. Still, the value of art as a physical object created by an individual human, and as something that is experienced firsthand by viewers in physical proximity to the object, has remained vital and unyielding. Further, while contemporary artists now reach international audiences on global platforms, each works in a particular environment that affects his or her process, ideas, materials, and content. Boston’s revolutionary history, its striking harbor and coastline, its fertile climate for technological innovation, and its role as a national leader in education and intellectual pursuits are just a few of the aspects of local life that have real impact on the artists who live and work here. Thus contemporary artists can be seen to be acting locally, even while pursuing global concerns and participating in dialogues of significance to artists and viewers around the world.

Randi Hopkins, Associate Curator

220-229: Hear FREE audio commentary on your cell phone at 617-231-4055.

ICA interpretive programs and materials are made possible by significant support from the Carl and Ruth Shapiro Family Foundation.Â

Robert de Saint Phalle (b. 1978, Phila-

delphia) explores the space between what a thing seems to be and what it is in artworks that both describe transition and are themselves transitional, conveying a sense of “in-between-ness” that is both spatial and psychological.

De Saint Phalle has been influenced by the psychoanalytic theory of the transitional object (a “security blanket” or favorite doll, for example) that allows a child to differentiate subject and object, self and other. Likewise, his sculptures exhibit both dependency and self-sufficiency, leaning on gallery walls and other objects to uphold their structure or otherwise incorporating or reflecting the architectural space around them. In his work, which spans sculpture, painting, and installation, painted abstract forms relate to planes and shapes found in nearby sculptures, and sculptures are comprised of broken parts of a single object, held in place by supporting steel brackets. Using materials that range from plastic bags to safety glass to stainless steel, de Saint Phalle interweaves skills common to architecture, sculpture, and industrial design, balancing fabrication and improvisation, revealing and concealing.

De Saint Phalle received a BFA from Cooper Union in 2001 and an MFA from Bard College in 2007. He is an adjunct faculty member in Sculpture and New Media at Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

Eirik Johnson

(b. 1974, Seattle) photographs the natural environment in ways that are intensely specific to the moment and place he is capturing and at the same time open to interpretation and experience. Details of light and color, line and form invite contemplation. He has photographed sites of industries that are based on natural resources, such as mining and timber operations, in the American West, and has explored the streets of West Oakland, in the San Francisco Bay Area, capturing the beauty in a place both transitional and steeped in history. In his project for the ICA, Johnson adds an additional sensory element—sound—to his work, joining images shot in the Peruvian Amazon using five- to seven-minute exposures with a stereo audio recording made at the same location and time as the photograph. The resulting works are presented as large-scale photographic light boxes that invite viewers to make connections between sound and sight in this beautiful and fragile location. Johnson does not, however, see his work as an attempt to re-create the experience of physically being within the landscape. Drawing on his talents as a musician, he incorporates sounds that slowly reveal themselves as bird or insect activity or an incoming storm on a lake to foster a heightened perception of what lies beyond the photographic image.

Johnson received a BFA from the University of Washington in 1997 and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2003. He is Associate Professor of Photography at Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

Fred Liang (b. 1964, Wuhan, China) makes work that incorporates drawing, sculpture, and interactive installation, using sources including the traditional art of Chinese paper cut (jian zhi) and Song Dynasty scroll paintings. Recognizing deep differences between Eastern and Western philosophy, but also uncovering areas of overlap and crosspollination between the two, Liang makes connections that seek to bridge these seemingly oppositional perspectives.

For example, in one body of work he interweaves a Ralph Waldo Emerson essay on nature with Taoist poetry to explore the merging of intellect and soul through relationship with natural forces. In other works, he links scientific studies on genetic protein structures with Taoist meditations on infinite emptiness to examine the universal need to connect with something beyond the self. In his most recent work Liang ponders the theory of “agent causation” proposed by philosopher Roderick Chisholm in 1964, which views the self as a free entity unaffected by historical events. This view contrasts sharply with the Eastern veneration of ancestors and the value placed on sacrifice in the present for the sake of the future. Liang explores these ideas through three intertwined points of entry: a lost language referred to as Nu Shu, or Woman’s Writing, created and used exclusively by women in a remote part of China; the promised gift of a mysterious box from the artist’s mother to his daughter; and a family tree inscribed in a book noting all the artist’s male family members dating back to the Ming Dynasty. The rich connections between genders and generations, forged over time and through language, speak to the artist’s interest in lost histories and ongoing stories.

Liang received a BFA from the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg in 1989 and an MFA from Yale University School of Art in 1991. He is a Professor in the Fine Arts 2D Department at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. and Design.

Rebecca Meyers

(b. 1976, New York City) is a filmmaker who shoots, edits, and finishes on 16mm film, meaning that not only are her images originally captured on film, but her end product is film as well, as opposed to video or other digital media, which is how most movies are finished today. Meyers chooses to work with “small gauge” 16mm film as opposed to the wider 35mm film that is commonly used in commercial motion pictures because it offers an intimate means of exploration and the opportunity for direct connection with light, which is in many ways at the core of her work. Her exploration of the resolution, contrast, and texture of light, together with her keen eye for the appearance of nature in our lives, lend nuance and intensity to her short films, whether she is filming such everyday subjects as squirrels, housecats, or an apartment window in winter, or the sublime—glaciers calving, the full moon, the ocean.

Meyers pays close attention to experiences of the natural world that are common in contemporary society but that often go unnoticed, such as the domestic and “wild” animals in our midst, as well as to natural elements pictured in wallpaper, murals, car logos, and city statues. Wind and darkness, reflection and cold are also elements of Meyers’s evocative films. Her distinctive sound tracks further suggest a broad definition of “environment” while underscoring the multi-faceted aspects of looking, watching, and seeing found in her films.

Meyers received a BA from Cornell University in 1997 and an MFA in Film and Video Production from the University of Iowa in 2001. She is Archive Coordinator at the Harvard Film Archive in Cambridge.

Matthew Rich (b. 1976,

Boston) works with latex paint on cut paper to make compositions that straddle the line between two and three dimensions. The dual nature of these works extends beyond their physical ambiguity, as Rich explores a balance between structure and fragility, intention and accident, front and back, wall and not wall, abstraction and representation, illusion and concrete presence, the hard boundary of a scissor cut and the feathered edge of a rip. Process is a key element here. Rich’s studio practice invites accident and at the same time is carefully intentional. He begins by painting both sides of large sheets of paper with flat latex paint. Painted while on the floor, these sheets absorb evidence of their making and the passage of time in the form of footprints and detritus introduced by unclean rollers. These sheets are then moved to a large table, where they are cut and re-cut until there is a sea of small pieces that are then combined in response to ideas worked out in innumerable sketchbooks. No definitive “front” is established during this process, as Rich flips works back and forth, adding and removing fragments to create works that sometimes exhibit an optically coherent three-dimensional illusion—a prism, an unfolding ribbon, steps, or stairs. Other times they display the universally recognized language of the everyday accident: the rip, the spill, the fold. In addition, the work sometimes has a tangible compositional relationship to the wall, and by extension to the larger environment in which it is shown.

Rich received a BA from Brown University in 1998 and an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2004. He is a lecturer in the Department of Art + Design at Northeastern University.

Daniela Rivera (b. 1973,

Santiago, Chile) creates installations comprised of paintings that exist in relation to and establish particular spaces, manifesting pictorial space without losing connection to materiality.

Inspired by decorative murals and frescos from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which were often painted on interior walls to create the illusion of being outdoors, Rivera’s installations use paintings as a tool for generating a physical experience that goes beyond the purely visual. Viewers walk right into, or must in some way navigate, the paintings, which often feature sky imagery.

Rivera paints the sky not so much to express a personal experience of nature, but rather to explore a shared, cultural history of the sky as it has been painted over the centuries.

In her most recent work, Rivera’s sky is also a massive carpet, affixed to the wall at its highest point and spilling out onto the gallery floor. Rivera’s sky does not remain above us, but rather rushes out to meet us, redirecting our movement through the gallery. Movement through space and time, the migration of people and ideas, and the way culture is transported and digested are central to Rivera’s practice.

An example of such phenomena is the Memling carpet, a Turkish design that is now known by the name of the fifteenth-century Northern Renaissance artist who used it as a decorative element in his paintings. In Rivera’s work, small blotches of patterned rug reminiscent of this source image have migrated into the great expanse of sky as droplet-like splashes. These splashes suggest an accidental intrusion of cultural elements that relates to the historical perception of the East’s role as an ornament or backdrop to Western culture. Rivera’s painting of the historically charged rug engages not only its visual appearance but also its history and the technical process of its making, which she re-creates as she paints, knot by knot and strand by strand.

Rivera received a BFA from Universidad Católica de Chile in 1996 and an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts/Tufts, Boston, in 2006. She is Assistant Professor of Art at Wellesley College.

Evelyn Rydz (b. 1979, Miami) creates intricate drawings based on her own photographs. In recent works she has focused her attention on objects she finds washed up on coastlines worldwide, including in Cartagena, Colombia, Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, Lima, Miami, and Boston. Exploring the site where sea meets land, she is absorbed by these “characters with long stories to tell.”

When a stray plastic sandal or a smooth piece of driftwood near a smashed water bottle captures her attention, she gets close to the ground to photograph the found tableaux from an eye-level perspective. By including the sea as a faint line in the distance in the finely detailed graphite and color pencil drawings that ultimately result from this process, she references the journey and transformation that these objects have undergone, illuminating their role as castaways in foreign landscapes. Rydz’s meticulously rendered travelers appear lost or discarded, vulnerable to vast and unpredictable forces beyond their control. They also suggest migration and adaptation, journeys that may or may not have been undertaken by choice, as well as the romance and bravery of those who set out to sea seeking the unknown. Two new groups of drawings—Castaways and Drifting Islands—respond specifically to the Boston coastline.

Rydz received a BFA from Florida State University in 2001 and an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 2005. She is Assistant Professor in Studio Foundation at Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

Amie Siegel (b. 1974,

Chicago) works in 16mm and 35mm film, video, photography, sound, and writing, often using the cinematic image as a material means to a conceptual end. In multi-channel video and film installations, she reformulates cinematic elements and conventions such as establishing and tracking shots and the remake to explore otherwise intangible senses of absence, historical disorientation, and nostalgia. Weaving together diverse areas of concern—including history, memory, voyeurism, surveillance, psychoanalysis, modernist architecture, and the futuristic landscape—Siegel mixes original footage and historic images from obscure archives, as well as making use of found, amateur Internet performances, to upend traditional genre conventions. Her work often moves unexpectedly between what is scripted and what is spontaneous, what is documentary and what is fictitious, and who is acting and who is not. Dialogues and trains of thought opened up in one film reappear and continue or change direction in subsequent films. Actors are seen “between” scenes, or performing screen tests, as well as “acting” out their assigned roles as characters. Looking and being looked at are explored from psychological, historical, sociological, geopolitical, technological, and literary angles in work that travels from the psychoanalyst’s couch to the teenager’s bedroom, courtesy of YouTube. In her most recent work, Black Moon, Siegel looks to a future that never was to imagine a post-apocalyptic American landscape.

Siegel received her BA from Bard College in 1996 and her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1999. She is Assistant Professor of Visual & Environmental Studies at Harvard University.

Stephen Tourlentes (b.

1959, Galesburg, Illinois) has been photographing prisons across the United States for over a decade. Often set a stone’s throw from everyday life “outside,” yet separated by highly visible physical barriers as well as by inherent psychological ones, prisons are an alien sight at the edges of American cities and suburbs.

Tourlentes works in black and white and shoots these complex reflections of the social compact at night. Both strategies work to sharpen contrasts and at the same time to unify his compositions. From a distance his images of state and federal prisons, state death-house prisons, and private prisons have an overall glow that might recall Mark Rothko’s paintings. Up close, however, the haunting source of light in the photographs is revealed—and it is as mundane as it is uncanny. Since 1980 the number of prisons in the US has quadrupled. The US has less than 5 percent of the world’s population, yet it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners. Tourlentes shoots from a bit of a remove—there is only so close one can really get to a prison. His depictions highlight our tendency to locate prisons on the periphery of our society’s consciousness and raises questions about attitudes toward crime, punishment, rules, and boundaries. Time seems to stand still in these dark scenes, a reminder of the wide gap between temporal experiences inside and outside of these institutions.

TTourlentes received a BA from Knox College and an MFA from Massachusetts College of Art, where he is currently Visiting Professor of Photography in the Media and Performing Arts Department.

Related public programs

Saturday, October 2, 2010, 2pm Panel discussion: Think Global, Act Local Co-hosted by Artadia and presented in conjunction with the 2010 James and Audrey Foster Prize, this panel discussion looks at how we can think globally, but act locally in today’s art climate. Artadia is a non-profit organization that grants cash awards and exhibition opportunities to select artists in five U.S. cities: Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Houston, and the San Francisco Bay area.

Sunday, October 24, Sunday, November 7, and Sunday, November 21, 2010, 3pm 3x3@3: Gallery talks by 2010 James and Audrey Foster Prize Finalists Each talk will include presentations by three of the nominated artists and a conversation with Associate Curator Randi Hopkins.

Sunday, October 24, 2010, 3pm Daniela Rivera Fred Liang Steve Tourlentes Sunday, November 7, 2010, 3pm Robert de Saint Phalle Amie Siegel Matt Rich Sunday, November 21, 2010, 3pm Rebecca Meyers Evelyn Rydz Eirik Johnson

Thursday, October 28 and Thursday, November 11, 7pm Words and Images 2010 Foster Prize finalists present their work on the big screen in the Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater Thursday, October 28, 7 pm Rebecca Meyers, including Q & A with the artist and Associate Curator Randi Hopkins 2010 James and Audrey Foster Prize finalist Rebecca Meyers presents a selection of short work including the New England premiere of her newest film, blue mantle.

Thursday, November 11, 7 pm, Amie Siegel, DDR/DDR (High Definition, 135 min, color/sound) including Q & A with the artist and Associate Curator Randi Hopkins

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