Principal Juror -  Ingrid Schaffner, Senior Curator,  Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania

Juror's Comments - First a disclaimer: it is difficult to judge works of art from slides––particularly painting, and especially abstract painting, which is, on some important level, about surface (a quality that never fully translates into photographic reproduction). Even if the surface is about flatness and suppression, that is a decision the artist made for the viewer to take into account. Nonetheless, a selection can be made, which is exactly what follows. While these remarks are rhetorical, they are the absolute premise of this process, throughout which anyone who enjoys looking at and thinking about contemporary art is keenly aware of the limitation of choosing work from slides. There is a desire to experience art not on the page, but in the studio, the gallery, the park, or elsewhere––a desire, which this publication cannot shake, but can certainly stir.

The Open Studio Press does an incredible job of managing a tremendous volume of submissions. From the hundreds of artists in the Mid-Atlantic region who submitted slides of their work for consideration, I selected forty. My selections aim to represent a range of current practices as inflected through my own interests as a curator. These include a strong predilection for drawing. Traditionally viewed as secondary, drawings were considered studies for finished works of art, usually in other mediums. In the past decades, however, as both a medium and a practice, drawing has emerged as primary. See the recent exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, organized by Laura Hoptman, that features artists working on paper to create significant works in their own right. In turn, the gestures of drawing, from handwriting to cartooning, are everywhere in art. One anticipates a future corollary to the 1980’s phenomenon, when photography moved into mainstream practice, giving rise to such museological conundrums as “Does the Cindy Sherman belong to the Painting and Sculpture Department, or to Photography?” Judging from its preponderance in New American Paintings, drawing now makes a similar encroachment to subvert the dominance once held by oil on canvas and the pure language of paint. As a curator, I have followed these developments––call it the mongrelization of painting––with interest. Admittedly, one area of painting in which I am not particularly involved, and which appears from the slides submitted to be widely practiced, is a kind of magic realism.

For those who know my work, which is often involved with surrealism, this may seem surprising and call for some clarification. As a matter of taste, I don’t read fantasy literature either; subjectivity in the extreme verges on the irrelevant. Surrealism, on the other hand, involves undermining forms of authority and claims of objectivity, with imagination, humor and critique. That spirit surfaces in a number of works, often effectively in tandem with the drawing impulse.

And what of painting itself? I appreciate seeing the traditional problems and pleasures of painting being taken on with integrity. Throughout this selection are to be found plenty of indications that paint’s possibilities for representation and abstraction continue to yield endless invention and engagement by artists working today.