News - April 23, 2010

Winners announced in Second Studio Arts Juried Art Competition

Donatello 21: five studios showcasing this semester’s truly exceptional student artwork, including paintings, photography, drawings, sculpture, art on fabric, and jewelry. During the end-of-the-semester exhibition, the jury faced the tough task of choosing one winning piece for the SUF Studio Arts Purchase Prize Award—and failed. In the end, they felt compelled to choose the work of two students: photography by Jisoo Ha, Parsons School of Design, and a painting triptych by Erin Mallea, Loyola Marymount University.

The jury was made up of Paula Bortolotti, Art Critic and Curator, Valentina Gensini, Freelance Curator; and Reagan Wheat, Director-On-Site, Washington University. Nick Kraczyna, STA Coordinator, announced with pride that the work exhibited this semester really put the jury members in a difficult position: “The two winners were chosen out of thirteen semi-finalists. It was impossible to select only one winner.”

Jisoo Ha’s photography focuses on unexpected parts of a whole. It is saturated with rich, jewel tones, giving it a surrealistic edge. SUF photography professor Stefania Talini,had this to say about Ha: “Though Jisoo is a beginner, her work shows a rare awareness in the use of space, color and composition. Her subjects are never conventional and her images go beyond "reality." Jisoo is not interested in descriptive or documentary photography; rather, she creates strong images by observing every day objects and finding in them new shapes, color and meaning.”

Mallea’s winning triptych is a reflection of her curiosity about how age, time, and distance shape an object and it’s relationship to an individual—is it relic or artifact? Perhaps both? What exactly gives ‘aura’ to an object? Mallea began putting together different objects, observing how each was transformed according to its relationship to both the viewer and another object. The triptych is a result of this process. Added Mallea, “I painted a picture within a picture in order to alter the representation of an object and connote a level of documented history and separation.” 

SUF art professor Kirsten Stromberg said "In the work Is There Magic? Erin explores a delicate balance between understanding the tradition of painting and using it to pose contemporary philosophical questions on the constructions of representation, illusion and language. Working with elements pertinent to Italian history and culture—the debate between relic and artifact, the sacred and the profane—Is There Magic? points to space between things and the complex relationship of how we construct and question the world around us."

Jisoo Ha and Erin Mallea will share the STA merit prize.