Principal Juror - Carl Belz, Director Emeritus, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA

Juror's Comments - As on earlier occasions, I enormously enjoyed the opportunity to survey work from a sector of the country with which I’m not directly familiar; in this case, the Mid-Atlantic states. I initially went through the slides a couple of times, making no decisions, just getting a feel for the contours of the playing field, which turned out to be typically varied—from funky to fantastic, from landscape and figuration to abstraction, not to mention a number of hybrid genres. The process of elimination then began, allowing the cream to gradually ascend and sustain itself during the next rounds of looking. Or was that process simply a matter of my own tastes asserting themselves—my comfortable aesthetic habits, as Marcel Duchamp would have put it? When asked (and I’m sure you’ve experienced this) most jurors will say they made their selections on the basis of quality, pure and simple, as if objectively, without bias in favor of one kind of sensibility over another. I’ve no reason to doubt them, I could say the same thing myself.

But it’s usually more complicated than that, for habits—and the biases they represent—are inevitably brought to the table and must be reckoned with in terms of their positive or negative effect on the shape of the final selections. With me, for instance, there’s a persistent taste for abstraction, because abstract painting of the New York School (call it modernist painting) was what I learned to love back when I first learned about the art of our time, and I’m always on the lookout for work extending that tradition. I was accordingly surprised to find relatively few modernist abstractions among my ever-narrowing choices, making me think that maybe the critical mass of current pictorial talent now resides elsewhere, in figurative narration, say, or neo-surrealist dreamscapes, or whatever. At the same time, I thought I was maybe asking too much of abstraction, somehow wanting it, or expecting it, to match (in slides, no less) the authority of previous and face-to-face encounters, and I fretted about objectivity and fairness to those practicing the genre today and the fact that habits, even the comfortable ones, can cut both ways. That said, I found the pictures by Charles Burwell and Maggie Michael reasserting their authority in each round of looking, and I thus welcomed the opportunity to include them among my final choices.

Not so surprising (nor so fretful) was the fact that realist-type paintings and drawings easily outnumbered abstractions, both at the beginning of the selection process and at its conclusion—a reminder that most art making continues to spring from an urge to image the places and spaces and objects we encounter in daily experience, for they’re endlessly fascinating, at times unexpectedly so, especially when they seem on the face of it so humble and ordinary—like the rich textures and colorations of John Bavaro’s ichthyofauna. But the realist impulse just as regularly extends everyday encounters into surrealities, as in the mysterious, make-believe worlds of Nora Sturges. Realism’s guises seem equal in number with its practitioners—in the Mid-Atlantic region, as elsewhere.

Habits and their worries notwithstanding, my rule of thumb during the selection process was to achieve an embracing cross section of genres and styles—abstract, representational, and so forth—that would reflect the overall visual polyglot (including its attendant freedoms) that’s become normative in our postmodern, pluralistic culture. But there are always exceptions that test the rule: stuff that doesn’t fit and can’t be labeled; stuff you feel you don’t understand but nonetheless find compelling, for it nudges your experience and imagination in new directions—like the haunting creatures in Andrew Au’s drawings or the weirdly appealing gizmos in the work of Donna Hepner. And maybe such exceptions do more than test the rule, maybe they actually prove it by demonstrating that the enabling freedoms of postmodernism—not unlike those of modernism itself—can, in fact, be what they’re cracked up to be, especially the freedom to be exceptional in the first place.

That freedom, the freedom associated with modern art generally, manifests itself in the myriad worlds shaped by individual artists in pursuit of their individual visions and in turn shared with us in the hope of enriching—maybe even reshaping—our own worlds (including, not least, the looking habits that infuse them). That was my bottom line in the selection process, though I naturally hope the rewards it yielded me will not in the end be mine alone.