Juror's Statement:
"The Morgan’s National Juried Exhibition celebrates artists who use paper as an artistic material. From nearly 600 entries this year, we selected 61 works that employ paper in traditional and innovative ways, ranging from prints, drawings, photographs, and artist’s books to sculptures and conceptual works. The submissions that excited us most were those that exhibited technical mastery that facilitates the content of the work, or an approach to paper’s potential that subverted our expectations. We were also struck by the emphasis in many of these works on the organicism of paper and its relationship to the natural world, our ailing environment, and our attempts to map and record what is happening around us. It is not coincidental that our Best in Show, a duo of works by Saul Melman, embodies all of these qualities, using paper, ink, and water to surprising, formally compelling ends, subtly relating the simple gesture of allowing ice to melt into and warp sheets of paper and alluding to the monumental impacts of climate change. Paper has been fundamental to modern civilization, and it also appears instrumental to capturing—and perhaps arresting—its slow decline."
Karl Anderson
Project Coordinator,
SPACES Gallery
Andrea Gyorody
Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art
Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College
National Juried Exhibition, Award Winners
Best in show:
Saul Melman
Anthropocene Series_03, Anthropocene Series_05
Ice, Carbon and Abaca
$3200
First Runner Up:
Janet Marsano
In The Lake of Very Bad Dreams
Pen and Ink with polychrome pencils
NFS
Three Morgan Conservatory Awards for Excellence:
Iris Grimm
a comparative overview of rivers
Hand bound partitioned case, accordion books, linocut prints
$800
Thomas Norulak
Driftwood Beach 9
Hand printed zinc plate photo transfer etching
$300
Anne S. Rogers
Clothed System
Handmade paper made from secondhand linen tablecloths sewn into clothes and worn continuously by Anne for 64 days in Spring 2018, wood.
NFS
Viewer’s Choice Award:
Lauren Webster
No Evil
Bristol paper, graphite powder
$475