2011
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2011 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 Rubén Ortiz-Torres with emerging artist Tristan Shone and Jay Johnson with emerging artist Adam Belt exhibition at Anthenaeum Music & Arts Library in La Jolla.
Catalogue Writers |
Amy Galpin, Curator, Sqn Diego Museum of Art
Karen McGuire, Director, William D. Cannon Art Gallery Leah Ollman, Art Critic Natalie Haddad, Art writer Sally Yard, Professor Art History University of San Diego |
Rubén Ortiz-Torres
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Rubén Ortiz-Torres was born in Mexico City in 1964. Educated within the utopian models of republican Spanish anarchism soon confronted the tragedies and cultural clashes of post colonial third world. After giving up the dream of playing baseball in the major leagues he decided to study art. He went first to the oldest and one of the most academic art schools of the Americas (the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City) and later to one of the newest and more experimental (Calarts in Valencia CA). After enduring Mexico City's earthquake and pollution he moved to LA with a Fullbright grant to survive riots, fires, floods, more earthquakes, and proposition 187. During all this he has been able to produce artwork in the form of paintings, photographs, objects, installations, videos, and films. He is part of the permanent Faculty of the University of California in San Diego. He has participated in several international exhibitions and film festivals. His work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid Spain and others.
Tristan Shone
Tristan Shone layering of differently guitars, keyboard, and electronic percussion to create the sound that is the justification for the shapes of his sculptures. Just as the music has melody and discordance, the structures he forms have flow and angle. This contrast of mechanical and emotional is confident, intense, and impressive. Alongside fabricating machines and composing sound for performance, Shone works at the National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research as a mechanical engineer and the Center for Research and Computing in the Arts at the University of California, San Diego as a researcher in sound interface design. Tristan Shone as Author & Punisher is an industrial doom and drone metal one man band utilizing primarily custom fabricated machines/controllers and speakers. He has performed and shown these machines in festivals and exhibitions in the United States and abroad extensively, releasing his third album, yet first sculpture/art based album entitled “Drone Machines” in 2010 on Heart & Crossbone Records out of Tel-Aviv. His new record, focused primarily on the newer Dub Machines, will be released in the Summer/Fall for 2011.
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Jay Johnson
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Jay S. Johnson has worked with several materials, from clay to wood and metals. He has experimented more with paint recently, and has incorporated it beautifully into his wooden sculptures. An expert craftsman, he has worked off and on in construction, refining his wood-working skills. Whether his works are figurative or symbolic, they are most often wry and thoughtprovoking. Johnson himself says, “Utilizing the neutral background of the wall I attempt to draw the viewer closer to my objects by employing simple yet seductive materials and forms. Familiar images applied to these interior shapes may sometimes be clues to deciphering the content of the work, which typically deals with issues concerning man’s relations to each other and to nature.” Robert L. Pincus, art critic for the San Diego Union-Tribune wrote about Johnson’s solo exhibition at the Athenaeum Music & Art Library, saying: “The two major qualities that make Jay Johnson’s art so persistently compelling come together gracefully in “Smoking Room,”… One of them is his genuine gift for elegance – not easy elegance, but the taut sort of understated beauty that emanates from a keen sense of how to use materials and employ symbolic images. The second quality is his fascination with the relationship between a single form and surrounding objects, which takes a new form in this show.” Johnson work has been widely exhibited, reviewed, and collected in California including the important Museum of Contemporary Art solo show in 1997. Jay Johnson has been a UCSD lecturer for sculpture since 2001.
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Adam Belt
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Adam Belt works with physical manifestations of the unseen including the inherent properties of materials such as salt, ice and concrete, our interaction with the landscape and our wonder of the cosmos. Currently he is working with and documenting a small portable phenomenological installation. “A Thing is a Hole in a Thing it is Not” is comprised of two full-length mirrors with a lit wall in between. Experienced and documented outside at various locations during the naturally changing light of afternoon/evening the viewer observes and experiences a heightened sense of time and the presence of the self. Adam Belt received his BFA from the University of San Diego and completed his MFA from Claremont Graduate University in 2001 and is now working as an artist and a professor in San Diego. His work is included in many local collections including the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and the La Jolla Athenaeum Music and Arts Library. Adam has been published in Leonardo, the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology magazine. His work has been reviewed in The San Diego Union Tribune, Art Week, Riviera and various other publications.
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San Diego Art Prize presented by:
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