2010
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2010 Artist Recipients
The San Diego Art Prize committee selected two established San Diego artists who then chose emerging artists to feature in the final exhibitions. This year's recipients were Gail Roberts with emerging artist David Adey and Einar and Jamex de la Torre with emerging artist Julio Orozco.
Catalogue Writers |
Alessandra Moctezuma, Director, San Diego Mesa College Art Gallery
Einar and Jamex de la Torre, Artist Gail Roberts, Artist Heriberto Yépez, Professor and Art Writer Karen McGuire, Curator of Exhibitions, William D. Cannon Gallery Lauren Buscemi, USD Art History Instructor and Freelance Art Writer |
Gail Roberts
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Current artworks by Gail Roberts are trail-markers for our times. Roberts moved in 2006 from an idyllic rural community in north San Diego back to city life. She transitioned from painting the beauty and catastrophic events of nearby scenes to a new range of concepts in response to what she perceives as a compromised and troubled relationship to nature in today’s culture. Both periods of her work share rich color palette, fine draftsmanship and superior composition. Roberts is an obsessive collector. She has gathered and catalogued collections of birds' nests, animal bones, dirt samples, and rocks from hiking and traveling. She has also documented nearby locations over extended periods of time amassing hundreds of photographs of the exact same site, observing both dramatic and subtle changes. Aspects of these collections have found their way into the paintings. The juxtaposition of natural and synthetic environments in the paintings is not so much to judge the scenario but to actively influence the subject and show how we are increasingly alienated from nature. Amazingly she does this with irony and humor and the works are actually joyful. In the series Accumulations, Roberts has documented her own collection of patterans or trailmarkers, a word originating in Europe. Patterans were made of natural materials, such as handfuls of grass or stones heaped in cairns. Robert’s patterans are piles of paperbacks, weekly trash accumulations or pyramided assortments of cut flowers. The most recent paintings focus on a further investigation of books and book titles as subject matter juxtaposed with images of birds' nests. The paintings continue to be a vehicle for inquiry and commentary regarding her reflections on nature, culture and our temporal existence. Roberts’ work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including a recent solo exhibition at the Galeria Nacional in San Jose, Costa Rica and Luis de Jesus Seminal Projects in San Diego, CA as well as inclusion in a traveling exhibition entitled Speculative Terrain, Recent Views of the Southern California Landscape from San Diego to Santa Barbara.‘ She has received several awards including a California Arts Council Fellowship and residency fellowships in France and Costa Rica. She has completed public art commissions at the Chicago Public Library, Lux Art Institute, and Tree Lines at the San Diego International Airport. In 2010, she was awarded a Balinglen Artist's Fellowship, a month long residency in Ballycastle, Ireland. Gail Roberts received her BFA and MA at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and is a Professor of Art at San Diego State University.
David Adey
David Adey was born in Morristown, NJ in 1972. He graduated with a BA in Visual Art from Point Loma Nazarene University in 1994. He spent six years in the graphic design field in New York and San Diego creating corporate identity campaigns and package design for a variety of products and international brands. In 2002 he received his MFA in Sculpture from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. His work has been exhibited recently in San Diego, Los Angeles, Miami, Detroit, Boston and Berlin. He is currently Associate Professor and co-Chair in the Department of Art and Design at Point Loma Nazarene University where he teaches Sculpture, 3D Design, Contemporary Art Seminar and Illustration. His work will be featured in The Athenaeum in Feb/March 2010. He lives and works in Point Loma.
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Einar and Jamex de la Torre
Mexican-born artists Einar and Jamex de la Torre are brothers and artistic collaborators, who moved to the United States from Guadalajara, Jalisco in the early 1970's. Leaving behind the academic, religious and social rigors of an all-boys Catholic school in 1960's Guadalajara, the de la Torre brothers ended up in the small Southern California surf town of Dana Point, where they discovered the unbridled joys of co-ed public schools. While attending California State University at Long Beach in the 80's, they studied sculpture and glass blowing, during which time the artist-brothers began a flame-worked glass figure business. This business was quickly eclipsed when their artistic collaboration began in earnest in the late 1980's with small mix media works. In the late 1990's, they began to do large-scale sculptural installations, eventually branching out into commissioned site-specific and public art projects. Currently, the brothers live and work on both sides of the San Diego-Baja California border, enjoying a bi-national life style that very much informs their art. Einar and Jamex de la Torre have worked, taught and exhibited both nationally, as well as internationally. Their distinctive three-dimensional work can be found in galleries, museum collections, Museum catalogs, as well as in various public art installations. Recent recipients of the Joan Mitchel foundation award and the Louis Comfort Tiffany foundation award.
Julio Orozco
Julio Orozco began as a documentary photographer in 1992. Working for a daily newspaper on the police beat gave him a unique opportunity to portray the crime scene of his native city and develop a visual ability to communicate facts, which he later applied to his creative work. He transforms images to reinvent a sort of social 'realism' to avoid global standardization. Movie houses were designed for and provided us with a classic structure for storytelling from ideal romances to space invaders including popular myths of common people. Orozco has created an ongoing series of works related to these moving picture emporiums where the art is often displayed (as well as the institutional space of a museum or gallery) in thoughtful installations with interactive environments that enmeshed the audience in a web of narratives. Issues are raised of nostalgia, historiography and cultural identity. The experimental works are rendered by the appropriation of historical documents, objects, sounds and images to establish new connections between memory and fiction, past and future as a reflection on Cinema. Orozco was nominated by Debra Poteet for this award and this is her statement:" I first visited Julio’s studio about 5 years ago after some of his pieces were shown at the Strange New World Show at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art. Marcos Ramirez or Erre a wonderful conceptual artist and a person who many of the Tijuana artist look-up to as both a mentor and spokesperson for the Border Art Scene, arranged for us to visit several Tijuana based artists including Julio Orozco. Julio’s studio or more like a garret in the traditional historical context of turn of twentieth century Paris, was small and dark with an almost cave like quality. There like Merlin the magician, Julio had created some of the most original conceptual pieces, we had ever seen. His videos shown through the lenses of ancient movie projectors, were both haunting and mystical. His photography of Mexican cartoon characters, spoke volumes of the cultural context he lived in and also displayed his considerable photographic talent. And the retrieved from the rubble cinema seats were simply magic. The quality of Julio’s work from a collectors standpoint, evokes mystery and wonder. You just can’t stop looking at his work."
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San Diego Art Prize presented by:
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