Finalists of myartspace / Bridge Art Fair Miami competition

Finalists of myartspace / Bridge Art Fair Miami competition

Myartspace, along with Bridge Art Fair sponsored a competition juried by a world class panel from Bridge Art Fair, SF MOMA, San Jose Museum of Art and Whitney Museum of Art. The registration and submission period ran from September 1 through November 15, 2008. Fifty finalists were selected along with three top winners.

The three winners were Jonathan Brilliant, Beatrix Reinhardt and Douglas Ljungkvist. The four-person jury panel consisted of Elisabeth Sussman, senior Curator of the Whitney Museum, Janet Bishop, Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, JoAnne Northrop, senior curator of the San Jose Museum of Art, and Michael Workman, Founder of the Bridge Art Fair.

Catherine McCormack-Skiba, the founder of myartspace and CEO, noted, "We continue to marvel at the quality of work that the community puts up for consideration, and the challenge the jury confronts with such breadth and depth of material. Our goal continues to be to provide great opportunities for artists to have their work recognized by leading curators and the art public. We continue to see a global audience of artists and art appreciators in our community."

Michael Workman, Founder and Director of the Bridge Art Fair, said, "We have always believed the art industry will thrive with new entries, new models and new venues. myartspace.com brings to the table a dramatically new and contemporary way to address the art market. We welcome such innovation from the Internet in the Bridge Art Fair."

This will be a short series of entries acknowledging the fifty finalists. I shall post five at a time:

Paul Hickey -- www.myartspace.com/paulhickey
"My work explores space and colour interaction as central sensuous elements. Attempting a balance between control and chance I use bold industrial colours to achieve a democratic approach towards hue. Focusing on the correlation of the whole to its individual component pieces, I want my work to have a direct dialogue with the architecture and not to be confined by the picture plane but to fully discover architectural limits."

Milee Tibbs -- www.myartspace.com/milleetibbs
"I am drawn to photography because of its ubiquitous presence in our culture and because of the tension between the truth-value photographs infer and their inherent manipulation of reality. Despite our awareness of the mutability of photographic images, we approach them thinking we know what to expect: something that-has-been, a fixed subject inside a frame. If the fundamental nature of photography is the fixing of an image, then it is my goal to create an image whose subject is illusive. I develop my work out of my desire to scratch off the surface of the image and expose its construction.

My recent work is a response to our relationship with mediated images, specifically those of women. I use the transgressive space of self-portraiture to upend the canonical power relationship between photographer and subject. This is a picture of me is an attempt to locate the self in an image. This series both evokes the impossibility of going back to childhood and questions the desire to do so. The act of reenacting these photographs is a gesture meant to question how a woman is expected to present herself.

In present American culture, women are asked to have the body of fourteen year olds, and fourteen year olds are presented as desirable women. There is an obsession with youth and sex, and not coincidentally, there is also an obsession with pedophilia. By reenacting these childhood poses I am asking the viewer to reinterpret them through what I see as our culturally confused and confusing relationship to sexuality."

Mari Richards -- www.myartspace.com/maririchards
"Our culture is hell-bent on consuming everything around us. In every area of life – from food, to information, to our choice of identity and beyond – we create a concept of self by asking our bodies and minds to incorporate and assimilate our surroundings. This habitual filling assumes that individual bodies can take it all in, and continue in the same oblivious state as they began. But, what is our personalized bodily response to this excess and overfilling? How do we cope – subconsciously and corporeally – with too much input, and no end in sight"

James Robert Ford -- www.myartspace.com/jamesrobertford
James Robert Ford is a contemporary British mixed media and installation artist. James attended Goldsmiths College, London. His artwork is often based around social interaction and include elements of game play, participation, communication and humor, and is recognizable in form by its heavy use of the Internet as a means of creating, displaying and promoting artworks.

Yeni Mao -- www.myartspace.com/yenimao

"My work investigates nationalism, in its broadest sense, and the slippery navigation of belonging. The most current work deals with absence and fullness, the imbuing of a template with desired characteristics, and the potential blankness of identity. Personality is hollow, an amalgamation of characteristics plucked from your heroes and shaped by your chosen environment. This is accomplished through series of works that circulate around this central subject.

The images I choose to work with are either the assembly of smaller wholes to make one larger body and movement, or are a single body that addresses the interior space of the silhouette. The fascination with mutable identity is really a reaction towards the American dream, being anything you want to be- especially relevant to immigrant societies, but widely applicable."

About myartspace:
myartspace, the premier online venue for contemporary art, is one of the fastest growing and diverse communities on the internet. Its members include more than 50,000 artists, collectors, gallerists and other art world professionals from across the globe, and it currently has on display hundreds of thousands of pieces of fine art.

Membership on myartspace is free and artists can upload an unlimited amount of work including images, music and video. Myartspace is created and run by CatMacArt Corporation. CatMacArt Corporation is located in Palo Alto, California. CatMacArt Corporation also is the company behind The New York Art Exchange (www.nyaxe.com) the premier online marketplace for contemporary art.

For more information visit, www.myartspace.com/miamibasel/winners/winners.html

Take care, Stay true,

Brian Sherwin
Senior Editor
www.myartspace.com