Pamela Meadows

Congratulations to all of the artists who submitted their work to The Hopper Prize! The experience of jurying this cycle’s applicants was an honor. I am appreciative of the opportunity to delve into such a compelling range of artistic practices and explore how this group of exceptional applicants presented the breadth of their interests through the scope of various artistic mediums.

This year’s submissions represented a range of ideas and varied perspectives that crossed a wide array of mediums. As a contemporary art curator, I felt drawn to the ways in which artists were expanding their language and understanding of materials, while fearlessly being vulnerable and generous with sharing so much of themselves within each application. I was met with gripping practices that explored themes such as personal identity, environmental justice and advocacy, memory, and healing to name a few. Throughout the review process, I found myself returning to works that explored hybridity and a boundlessness to being simply one, definable thing.

Prize-winning artists Azadeh Gholizadeh, Galina Kurlat, and Britt Ransom emerged as highlights from this year’s cohort of applicants. Initially, each of their practices felt thematically independent, or separate from one another. Gholizadeh’s tapestries blur the boundaries of 2D and 3D, shapeshifting from flat tapestries to sculptural objects that explore the body, landscape, and fragmentation of memory. Despite the slowness of her hand-based process, the work exudes a kind of fast, new media intensity like a glitch or pixelation on a screen. Ransom utilizes emergent, digital fabrication technologies to transform data and material gathered from the environment to investigate the form and function of society and nature. Kurlat’s non-figurative, lumen prints address themes of identity, mortality, and the body. Despite their abstract, painterly appearance, the artist uses a camera-less photography process called a solar photogram.

While their practices ranged thematically, Gholizadeh, Kurlat, and Random investigated a deep sense of questioning, challenging, and re-presenting what materiality can do when pushed. Now, perhaps more than ever, contemporary artists are defying clear distinct boundaries of what something is, in advocacy of what it can be. Their work resists definitive categorization or definition, enriching their conceptual framework and prompting the viewer to look more closely at the things that surround us.