Best in Show
Posted by David | Filed under Press
I just found out that I received Best-in-Show honors at the Craft Studio Gallery’s exhibition ‘Figure It Out’ for Habakkuk (which you can see here in a recent post).
Special thanks to Juror Matthew Ballou for choosing my work. Here is his Juror Statement:
The capacity for the morphology of the body to exhibit profound emotional and physical states has made it central to human expression since the earliest cave paintings. The human body is, in its many permutations and variances, among the first order of form and content, utility and beauty, of all that we observe in the world. The figure carries coiled tension and transcendent release, and the psychological meanings of these physical manifestations – as well as so many more – are bound up in its form. Bodily shapes and conditions are real, and we recognize that fact because we ourselves are embodied. We each have a body, and this universal condition underlies why humans have always been drawn to represent the figure in art. The form is compelling; its “elements of tension and relaxation […] are the most concrete examples of the kind of formal relationship which artists are trying to discover everywhere in the natural world.”
[1] Through that formal beauty we are drawn to the meaning embedded within. The body – however flawed or multifaceted it might be or however modified by societal and environmental pressures – is a kind of perfect archetypal structure. In this it becomes a great and enduring subject for contemplation.
[1] Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956), 248.
