Nature

Our third Art competition “Nature” started in April 2019 and concluded on May 25, 2020. Art Room Gallery received entries from many countries around the world: USA, Germany, Canada, France, Australia, Japan, Netherlands, United Kingdom, Serbia, India, China, Poland, Kuwait, Latvia, Sweden, Switzerland, Hong Kong. The Nature theme in this competition included a diversity in types, styles and mediums (oil on canvas, acrylic, photography, mixed media, digital, collage, pigmented concrete, nylon, charcoal, aluminum tubes, geotextile, wood, foam, watercolor, drawing, colored pencil, glazed porcelain and styrofoam). The following evaluation criteria has been used for judging the artwork: creativity, interpretation of the theme, originality and quality of art, overall design, demonstration of artistic ability, and usage of medium. Jury decided to select 94 artworks for inclusion in the exhibition. Aside from First, Second, and Third place Jury also presented Merit awards and Honorable Mention awards.

Thank you, and enjoy the exhibition!

Statement:

Zach Valent is an interdisciplinary visual artist who creates objects and installations that are encouraged by his fascination with growth and time. His artistic practice encompasses a multitude of processes ranging from mold making and casting to metal fabrication, woodworking, digital fabrication, and materials exploration. Valent received an MFA in studio arts from Arizona State University in 2017 and a BFA in sculpture from Southern Illinois University Carbondale in 2014. As a classically trained artist, Valent’s work presents a cohesive relationship of formal and conceptual elements offering a multifaceted experience to the viewer. By playfully combining motifs of geological development, archeological remains, advancing technology, and modern-day imagery, his work simultaneously explores ideas of the past, present, and future. Valent’s work has been admired, exhibited, and collected both nationally and internationally. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Nathan Cummings Travel Fellowship, The Rickert Ziebold Trust Award, and a Windgate Charitable Foundation for the Arts Award. Currently, Valent is living and working as a professional artist in the Phoenix Arizona. At Lot 14 studio, Valent can be found making a variety of unique artworks that include both personal and commission-based projects. He is a faculty associate of Phoenix College and Arizona State University, where he teaches beginning through advanced sculpture. When not focusing on art-related endeavors, Valent chooses to spend his free time exploring new and unfamiliar places, both local and afar.

Second place

Statement:

mySERENA, Serena Ho 何美贤, is a Chinese contemporary art painter, sculptor, designer and writer. These two exhibited artworks together with her solo art exhibition at ECOOL in Chongqing, China, last year are in included over 20 press stories. Her work sets out to challenge society’s conventional ideals of how life should be by offering contrasting human perspectives. The artist was being included in many solo/group art exhibitions before she had her first major solo art show at Hong Kong City Hall in 2017 and become the youngest female artist who have shown there. She has since had solo exhibitions in Chongqing in 2019 and Tokyo in 2020. Her new art book “A Tale of Serenity” was also published this year. Artworks: They are abstract representations of the famous “Golden Buddha Mountain”, in Chongqing, an isolated mountain with cliffs up to 300 meters. mySERENA was fascinated by the vast natural landscape and that sunlight in certain hours would “golden coat” the mountains – like several Buddhas sitting in the sky. Besides classical Western painting skills, she also used Chinese ink techniques such as splashing and dripping in both paintings. “Impression of Golden Mountain 1 and 3”: The mountains share it’s “light” with the sky and the ground. Fine outlines of the mountains can be seen from the middle left of the painting, in contrast to the overall minimalistic composition. Then, viewers are led to experience the golden mystical environment with bold fields of white at the bottom. In the bigger painting, fields of blue depict the long rainy seasons in Chongqing, while golden beams and rainbows will always shine again. The paintings capture the local’s interpretation of the mountains and its connection with nature, weather and time.

Statement:

Todd Jones was born in Tallahassee, FL, and is currently based in Ohio. As an experimental artist, Todd explores the boundaries between contemporary painting and sculpture. Todd is interested in construction-based materials, by repurposing how they are used as consumer products. He creates a visual language that challenges the viewer’s association and perception of these materials. Todd is interested in material culture and transformative labors through the use of modest material contrasting with the investments of labor by using meditative repetition, and mass production. A lot of his work explores the serendipitous phenomena from the processes of painting and expands them into sculptural skins. These skins, in turn, are superimposed on undulating three-dimensional forms derived from natural elements. Together, they occupy an unstable liminal space between nostalgia and our precarious future. Todd received his Bachelor of Fine Arts with a double major in studio art and psychology from Florida State University. He is currently living and working in Athens, Ohio and is an MFA candidate in Painting + Drawing at Ohio University. Todd has been an artist-in-residence at Studio 209 in Thomasville, GA and attended the Summer Painting and Sculpture Intensive at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, PA. He has had solo shows at Wild Goose Creative and the City Center Gallery at the Urban Arts Space in Columbus, OH.