Principal Juror – Beth Venn, Independent Curator, New York

Juror’s Comments - There was a time when the mention of painting evoked images of oil on canvas or board. Distinctions between various artistic media were clear and each had a very specific set of parameters: drawings were made on paper, paintings were created on canvas, and sculpture was anything decidedly three-dimensional. Fortunately, over time these strict definitions have blurred and broadened, allowing for a wide range of new possibilities in painting. In the halls of academia and in museum curatorial departments, there is still a strong desire to define, categorize, and label works of art, yet in the mind of the artist and while working in the studio, few such distinctions exist. Since at least the 1960's, artists have been pushing the definitions of their practice. The work of painters has become sculptural, photographers create large-scale installations, and sculptors are likely to envision public art projects or large, all-encompassing environments.

This year's submissions, from the southern region of the country, reflect this more democratic embrace of a wide range of work, and reference elements, attributes, or methods of painting, while not always following the standard definition of painting. While most of the submissions incorporate oil, watercolor, or acrylic paint, many are works composed primarily of charcoal, pastel, found objects, and even cement--works that might just as easily be seen through the lens of drawing or sculpture or installation work.

Katherine Taylor's "Afterimage" series of paintings are of vintage black and white photographs. Though painted with oil on canvas, their imagery hovers somewhere between painting and photography and are reminiscent of monochromatic works by Ed Ruscha or Vija Celmins. The works have a disquieting sense of dread. Cars are overturned, toppled onto one another, or perched precariously over a fence, in the aftermath of a natural disaster. Looking at these curious scenes, one's mind can't help but jump to the many documentary photographs of similar jumbled objects in the aftermath of the recent tsunami in Southeast Asia. But here, while references to photographic documentation are present, these "afterimages" are far from tragic and alarming. Rather, the sharp focus of the cars standing apart from the soft, blurred background lends them an air of quite serenity.

Like Taylor's work that straddles the line between painting and photography, Pang-Chieh Hsu's depictions of banal interiors have much in common with the photo-realist paintings of Robert Cottingham or Richard Estes. However, his painstakingly worked surfaces are not painted, but rendered in charcoal on paper. In all of his works, spaces are defined by way of oblique angles and uncommon perspectives and the sharp contrasts of dark and light instill a dramatic quality.

Painting liberated from a finite support, such as canvas or board has long been the attraction for muralists. Annie Kammerer Butrus takes this idea one step further by combining painted works in three-dimensional space, creating painting as environment. The light-dappled abstractions of her "Shadow Series" are painted on multi-part panels-- some grouped to form freestanding walls measuring as large as 60 x 12 feet--each evoking a different season. The artist creates room-like enclosures with a different "season" installed on the floor, on each wall, and above, creating an environment that is part shadowy forest, part endless space.

While working on an exhibition in Memphis a couple of years ago, I had the opportunity to visit Christine Conley's studio. Her work takes the form of an installation that is all about painting without being a painting, per se. Using standard oil paint, she carefully replicates the globs of mixed paint that form on her palette, swirling colors into uncommon compositions and forms. She paints the oil onto a plastic surface and then installs it on the wall, often as part of a constellation of many such forms. Conley's work questions whether oil paint, free from its support and treated like an object to be used as part of a larger installation, is still, in fact, a painting. Her method of mixing and blending paints is very much that of an oil painter, while the resulting work is more akin to large-scale installation or mural work.

Like the abstract expressionist painters of a half-century ago, Conley's work has much to do with the physical, tactile qualities of paint and how it is applied. For many abstract expressionist painters, the act of painting was often as much the subject of their work as the composition itself. Their dynamic way of working moved painting toward process and performance. As artists continue to push the definition of what painting can be, interesting hybrids develop, opening the door to new innovations in the medium.