Abstract

Our seventh Art competition “Abstract” started in February 2024 and concluded on March 28, 2024. Art Room Gallery received entries from many countries around the world: USA, Finland, China, Canada, Taiwan, Australia, Netherlands, Spain, Germany and Italy. The Abstract theme in this competition included a diversity in types, styles and mediums (oil on canvas, acrylic, watercolor, pastel, charcoal, gouache, digital painting, photography). 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 74 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:

As a professional sculptor, Jason Shih likes to experience the taste of life with perceptual observation in the subtle moments, and also likes the ever-changing situation of game shapes in the poetic imaginary space. For Jason Shih, art creation is to share various moods and stories in daily life. China Academy of Art (CAA), China Ph.D. Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), USA MFA Taipei National University of the Arts (TNUA), Taiwan BFA

Statement:

Ed Tomney is a New York based artist who studied fine art at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and has exhibited in New York, Los Angeles and Europe. His visual works center on representational and abstract painting from observed experiences and conceptual themes. Working with experimental visual media that includes chance operation, he uses variations of rendering technique that create richly developed surfaces of subdued tonality that balance a thin line between photographic depiction and the work of the hand. In the work titled “491 North”, layers of carbon, graphite, soot, and glue are applied to a surface which is then exposed horizontally to exterior weather conditions that span several days. During this condition, wind patterns, raindrops, dust particles and varying atmospheric conditions etch into the top layers of the facade creating pointillist markings and abstract tonal cascades. At times, the images created by this process suggest celestial bodies; other times networks of molecular spheres. He also works with sound and has presented numerous audio installations and performances in the US and Europe. A main interest in his pictorial images is how time is stretched due to the process of drafting/painting by hand a briefly visualized subject as an instant in time.

Statement:

The reassembly of the photographs figuratively illustrates that photographs are immediately and forever taken out of context. As much as resemblance is heralded as reality, photographs are disconnected from the reality that we take them to be. Reassembly challenges viewers to consider photographs without the resemblance and the composition that are central to the Modernist conception of photography. Reassembly is digital post-processing that challenges Modernist values by producing a self-collage that signals, as collages did a century ago, an expected, disturbing reality and by producing an (oxymoronic) non-representational photograph. Photographs of scenes with arrangements of deteriorating objects are reassembled to ask viewers to consider how photographs function without their chief characteristic: resemblance. Reassembling photographs takes constituent blocks out of context while each and every piece of the photograph remains visible and each piece–and the whole–remains a photograph. Repetition of the frame repeatedly illustrates that photographs are taken out of context.