Shortlist Announced For Converse Dazed Whitechapel Emerging Artists Award

The Whitechapel Gallery is partnering with Dazed and Converse for the 2012 Emerging Artists Award. This prize offers a platform for emerging unrepresented artists under 35. The judging panel includes the Turner Prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller and the Times Arts Commissioning Editor Nancy Durrant.

The shortlist has now been chosen by the panel, and comprises 4 new talents:

• Leslie Kulesh a London based American artist whose work ranges from sculpture and installation to performance. She uses these mediums to address issues related to current events and popular culture. Recent work has included using television to satirize the fashion world’s adoption of green technology and politics, as well as address female representation through the HD reality show star. Kulesh’s practice capitalizes on pop aesthetics in order to locate the political just beneath the surface.

• Myles Painter’s recent shows include Young British Art II in Zurich curated by Ryan Gander, a solo exhibition through the Whitechapel Gallery at Mansion House in London and Bold Tendencies III hosted by the Hannah Barry Gallery. Upcoming shows include the RBS Bursary Award 2012 and Grander Designs at Foodface project Space for PAMI (Peckham Artists Moving Image). “This is how space begins, with words only, signs on the blank page” – Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces I work with film, video, sculpture and installation to produce work about the critical understanding of the discourse of architectural spaces, be they physical or theoretical. The physical architecture with which I am concerned is the kind of architecture that offers up stories of its history and present incarnation through an individual’s inhabitation and lived experience. My interest in theoretical architecture investigates a collective response and application of critical theories of architecture and its influence on the design of social and psychological space. One of my main concerns is with the societal complexities and structural composition of a city. The appropriation of images and forms of the city through its use in cinema, photography and sculpture is key to my work. By re-editing this imagery into my own independent work I intend to represent a potential utopian or dystopian model for densely populated contemporary environments. I see a strong link between the working processes of artists and writers and am currently concerned with building discursive and collaborative relationships with different practitioners to develop specific concepts and to better articulate those ideas. At present I am investigating how the eschatological concept of ‘Apocalypse’ is manifested in contemporary culture and whether socio-political anxieties reflect or inform it. From this theory, as with the rest of my work, I aim to apply the information discovered through in-depth research and collaboration into works with alternative spatial and social narratives to determine the origins of the spaces we inhabit.

• Pio Abad was born in the Philippines in 1983. He previously studied at Glasgow School of Art and has just completed his MA at the Royal Academy Schools. Abad creates installations, photographs and prints that navigate the unstable and often ridiculous networks of power in which everything and everyone is a participant. Working with a combination of found objects and constructed imagery, his work stages juxtapositions that heighten the absurd relationships between things and events, between the anecdotal and the allegorical. Objects are remade or re-presented in order to activate their metonymic relationship to individuals, contexts and narratives. His past exhibitions have involved an ever-expanding cast of characters including Bo Derek, Norman Wilkinson, Imelda Marcos, George Hamilton, the Shah of Iran, Andy Warhol and the artist’s father. Abad is also one of the founders of Tele Nobela, an itinerant curatorial project based between London and Manila. Recent solo exhibitions include Dazzler, The Duchy, Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, 2012; 1986 -2010, Royal Academy Schools, London, 2012. Recent group exhibitions include The London Open, Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2012; Premiums, Royal Academy of Art, 2011; Bloomberg New Contemporaries, A Foundation, Liverpool and Club Row, Rochelle School, London, 2008 and Pio Abad/ Allison Gibbs/ John Thomson, Intermedia Gallery, CCA Glasgow, 2008. Samara Scott approaches her work from a highly contemporary consumers perspective, devouring information, stimulation and references in a wanton manner and operates with a liquidity and absent mindedness that recalls pop arts’ emergence in 50’s. Embracing ‘the simultaneous beauty and trauma of the internet’, Scott is an artist willing to assemble as many themes and ideas as possible, embracing the dreamy landscapes laid out by online heavyweights (think Apple’s pastel shades, Microsoft’s blue skies and green fields, Porsche’s design your own high-end automobile) and become sculptor, painter, designer and photographer of works that surreally defy classification. As part of an orchestrated narrative, objects can be digested from both art and design perspectives, backgrounds double as foregrounds – a blind operates as both a screen and a sculpture. Interiors take on significance when Scott interprets form and function through furniture and décor-design full of hyper-real tokens, a pick n mix of continental topicality, and a surreal mish-mash of pastel symbols.

• Samara Scott (b.1985, UK) lives and works in London and graduated from The Royal College of Art in 2011. In March this year she had a solo show at Arts&Jobs, and in June was part of 2 man show at Seventeen Gallery. This year she had also had her first group shows in the US, with Christopher Crescent at hd projects NY, and LVL3, Chicago. Also working in projects outside gallery format, she has shown work in online spaces such as bubblebyte and Sleeping Upright, built sets and costume for Luckypdf tv at Freize, and designed menus and furniture for her RCA graduation show Café Chateau. Other group shows include Mocha Non Truth at Cul De Sac 2012, Between Worlds, part of the Folkestone Biennale 2011, and The Response at the Sunday Painter.

Four finalists will be invited to create and exhibit site-specific work which will be exhibited in a specially-curated east London location. The winner will take home a £6,000 prize whilst the three runners up will receive £1,000 each.
An exhibition showcasing original works by the five artists shortlisted was held from 7-23 October at 37 Heneage St, London, E1 5L, 5 minutes walk from the Whitechapel Gallery. The shortlisted artists included: Gabriele Beveridge, Ellie Harrison, Bruce Ingram, Levack Lewandowski and Richard Parry.

The winner will be announced at the Whitechapel Gallery on Saturday 15 October.

Visit Whitechapel Here

Tags

, ,