Black & White

Our fourth Art competition “Black & White” started in December 2020 and concluded on January 14, 2021. Art Room Gallery received entries from many countries around the world: USA, Canada, Australia, Spain, Sweden, Hungary, Belgium, Oman, Egypt, Cyprus, Mexico, Zimbabwe, Finland, Germany, Italy, Taiwan, Japan, Austria, France, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Israel, China, Serbia and Taiwan. The Black & White theme in this competition included a diversity in types, styles and mediums (oil on canvas, acrylic, photography, pastel, watercolor, mixed media, digital, printmaking, etching, aquatint, steel, wire mesh, tar, feathers, fiber, graphite on paper, charcoal, scratchboard, pen and ink). 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 162 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!

First place

Statement:

Geneviève L'Heureux was born in Montréal, Canada and now lives in San Francisco, CA. She practiced then taught architecture for several years and it is in Rome, as a 2001 recipient of the Canadian Rome Prize, that she developed a passion for printmaking. It has been her main occupation since 2012. Her preferred techniques include etching, aquatint, mezzotint and chine coller. Geneviève’s work has been selected for several national and international juried exhibitions in the US and abroad. Among others, she has exhibited at the De Young Museum, San Francisco, the Royal Arsenal, London, the Katonah Museum of Art, NY, at the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, CA and at the International Print Center New York. She was part of print Biennials in Douro Portugal and Atlanta GA. Her work was shown at the PrintAustin, the Print Club of Rochester and at many other galleries where she was honored with several 1st place prizes and juror’s choice awards. Her artistic work, whether drawing or print, geometrical or figurative, attempts to express what belongs to the senses, to touch our humanity with evocative and emotional work. She proceeds to do this by challenging the well accepted theory that contrasting concepts (dark/light, mass/lightness, line/surface…), stand as polar opposites and, consequently, that we live in a world of extremes and of exclusion. She likes to think that the oscillation between opposing concepts mirrors our human condition, and that if her work is at all destabilizing, it may be because it brings us away from the comfort of established norms and strict definitions and closer to our fundamental nature: one of ambivalence and continuous transformation. Geneviève is a member of California Society of Printmakers and Boston Printmakers and has her studio in the Mission in San Francisco.

Second place

Statement:

Born in Berkeley, raised in Oakland, CA. BFA Maryland Institute College of Art, MFA Pennsylvania State University. Emerita Professor of Art, University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. My art is an intrinsic statement of the constant flux of motion, emotion and pounding resonance of existence. The line leaps, grabs and descends pulling at the tangled pile of unspoken thoughts that emerge and submerge. A work becomes a melody with each specific note a critical turning point in the flow of sound. Sometimes, the silence invades like a fog, softening, dampening until a new image appears. Through the layers of time, the substance of thought is grounded. Color and form dance, rage and discover a new place. In that place, the work begins to speak, a visual dialogue. In this dialogue, passion and pain become a singular understanding.

Statement:

I have had a life-long interest in photography gathering skills via professional mentoring in methods of film photography and techniques. I have translated these skills to the world of digital photography and the use of post processing to emulate film types and darkroom methods. I used photomicrography, electron microscopy and photo image analysis to enhance biochemical, molecular and genetics to answer biological questions about parasite-host interactions during my 30+ years as a professor and academic researcher during which I published 100+papers. I want my photographs to tell a story drawing on the viewer’s imagination and thus I focus often on street photography and photojournalism. I will convert digital images to black and white images if that tells the story better. One of my favorite techniques, when working in a dark room was to print black and white images as selenium-gold prints as by doing this I was able to bring out detail. Such is shown here in “The Train” where if one looks close images of riders can be seen. My work has been exhibited regionally and nationally in juried, curated, and solo exhibitions in gallery and on-line galleries. I tell a story through photography and while most of my work is done in-camera, I use post processing to emulate vintage films, and vintage techniques , as well as artistic expression found in paintings. I also print on a variety of papers such as metal paper and linen paper to gain full expression of the photograph and the post processing. It is not the photograph alone that tells the story but how the story is illustrated by the method chosen “in the digital darkroom” or on the paper selected for printing.