WIGA 2010
Is art just a pretty picture or can it change the world? Should it make you think? Should it make you act?
Team Kenan invited Duke students to submit original artwork that demands change, makes viewers laugh, squirm, grimace, cry, or wonder – and ultimately want to live better.
The winners of the inaugural What is Good Art? Competition were unveiled at the exhibit opening on April 5.
Top prizes went to:
Michael McCreary, “Tension in Yellow” (1st place)
Stephanie Vara, “The Dinner” (2nd place)
Colin Heasley, “Stop Signage” (3rd place)
Kirstie Jeffrey, “Love, Love, Love” (Honorable Mention)
Marissa Bergmann, “Veins and Brains” (Honorable Mention)
Zach Blas, “Queer Technologies” (Gallery Choice)
A prestigious panel of experts judged competition submissions on their ability to fuse ethical and aesthetic dimensions into one statement. The scope of work solicited for the competition was intentionally broad: students were free to interpret the ethics-art link in many different ways.
Panel of Judges:
William Fick, Visiting Assistant Professor of the Practice of Visual Arts
Margaret Mertz, Executive Director, Thomas S Kenan Institute for the Arts
Louise Meintjes, Associate Professor of Music
Noah Pickus, Director, Kenan Institute for Ethics
Thomas S. Rankin, Director, Duke Center for Documentary Studies
Kimerly Rorschach, Mary D.B.T. and James H. Semans Director of the Nasher Museum
Suzanne Shanahan, Associate Director, Kenan Institute for Ethics
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Chauncey Stillman Professor in Practical Ethics
Read the full 2010 statement for What Is Good Art? below:
See the rest of the 2010 What Is Good Art? Exhibition below.
Maria Isabel Arroyo, The Inevitable
The conceptual focus of my piece is the ephemeral nature of the ordered present, where what is well structured and easy to control is fated to deteriorate into a more chaotic future. My series is a scene that shows an evolution of a quiet neighborhood setting into a cyclone of expressive marks. The houses start off dominating over the composition with a small stretch of forest residing on the opposite side of the road, time passes and the neighborhood is flooded, the flood leaves and allows for a forest to take the place of the buildings, and the setting itself eventually deteriorates from a representational image to a pure abstraction. Deterioration becomes the law of the universe; what is man-made succumbs to nature, and nature itself is at the mercy of entropy. The creation of my series thus became about relinquishing control and avoiding the desire to move away from chaos. Instead of being a challenge, disorder became the catalyst for the creation of my series.
Intaglio as an art form is centered around the idea of exposing a zinc plate to acid multiple times leaving the plate with various ridges. The ink is applied onto the ridges and then prints out onto a sheet of paper. Repeated exposure to the acid has a heavily entropic effect on the zinc plate creating holes in the back and making it increasingly difficult to work with. My piece began with the idea of harnessing the entropic potential that springs from heavily abusing the plate, I would make a series that showed change over time and I would only use one plate, the image would evolve as I burnished the zinc surface to modify the resulting print. To me there is a beauty in the printmaking process’s inability to give the artist full control over the medium, the end result cannot be completely clean or perfect because the image is at the mercy of the acid. Likewise our position as permanent fixtures of existence resides on shaky hope of perfection, we will eventually submit to passage of time and be consumed by the earth and the earth itself is fated to non-permanence what remains are fragments, radio waves, and entropy. Through my process I decided to work with disorder as a catalyst rather than an inhibitor.